VOLUME TWO / SPRING / FALL 2016
DetroitResearch /On Dance
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Culture Lab Detroit’s 2016 focus looks at people who communicate
and practice their particular art by expressing themselves on a
wall—people that are philosophically aligned with Detroit and have
a keen understanding of the challenges and opportunities that this
city faces. Dialogues and other projects will address the issues
of empty spaces, changing population, urban renewal, and the
struggle to define a new environment of collaboration and respect.
www.culturelabdetroit.org
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
SANFORD BIGGERS:
SUBJECTIVE COSMOLOGY
On view September 9, 2016 through January 1, 2017
MUSEUM OF
CONTEMPORARY
ART DETROIT
IMAGE: Sanford Biggers, Shatter, 2015, production still. Courtesy of the artist.
This exhibition has been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
and is curated by MOCAD’s Executive Director Elysia Borowy-Reeder. Born out of
experimentation and a desire to create a new platform for engagement, this project
and exhibition is supported by the Joyce Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Arts, Massimo De Carlo Gallery, and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
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VOLUME TWO / SPRING / FALL 2016
Detroit Research is published in Spring and Fall by the Alexandrine St. Seminars,
© Detroit Research the present collection. All rights revert to authors upon publication.
e: DetroitResearchjournal@gmail.com
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fb: @DetroitResearch
Detroit Research has been made possible with support from
Cover Photo
Marie T. Hermann, Stillness in the Glorious Wilderness #1, 100x100x-
11cm, Stoneware, 2010. Photo by Tim Thayer, courtesy Marie T. Hermann
Inside Cover Photo
Leyya Mona Tawil, DANCE ELIXIR, Day of the Innocents [Enter The Martyr]
Photo by Ricardo Esway Photography
Back Cover Photo
Biba Bell, It Never Really Happened, Detroit, 2015. Video still by Christine
/Hucal, courtesy Biba Bell
Editor
Michael Stone-Richards
Assistant Editors
Marissa Jezak
Jessica Newberry
Web Designer & Manager
Curtis McGuire
Social Media Manager
Kristin Wellmer
Editorial Board
Addie Langford
Biba Bell
Kevin Beasley
Design Lead
Joshua A. Smith
Layout Design
Lisa Nettler
Alicia Stocker
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Susanne Feld Hilberry at the launch of Detroit Research, vol. 1, MOCAD, March 2015. Photo courtesy Shanna Merola.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Detroit Research will publish
Vito Acconci
Taylor Aldridge
Shiva Amahdi
Mary Elizabeth Anderson
Toby Barlow
Kevin Beasley
Biba Bell
Francesca Beradi
Maurice Blanchot
Jon Brumit
Joyce Cheng
Mitch Cope
Steve and Dorota Coy / Hygienic Dress League
Kate Daughdrill
Georges Didi-Huberman
Pierre Fédida
Vievee Francis
Petrova Giberson
Bill Harris
Jerry Herron
Scott Hocking
Tony Hope
Amy Kaherl
Leith Karmo
Sarah Kofman
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Ralph Lemon
Aaron Levy
Kate Levy
Monty Luke
Jean-Hubert Martin
Chris Monhollen
Marsha Music
Scott Northrup
Charlie O’Geen
J.H. Prynne
Samantha Schefman / Playground Detroit
Gina Reichert
Chris Scoates
Mike Smith
Mistinguette Smith / the Black Land Project
Chris Tysh
Sarah Wagner
Sarah Wilson
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Contents
Introduction
Michael Stone-Richards
1 /On Dance /016
On Dance: A Politics of Rhythm
Michael Stone-Richards
A Dancerly Divining Rod
Biba Bell
Liquor Store Theater: Dancing with
Gentrification in post-Bankruptcy Detroit
Maya Stovall
Ten Statements on Art and Culture
Mårten Spångberg
a photo essay: terry2day
Hamilton Poe
Sparkle, Glitter, Pop...or A Field Guide
for Spatial Transgression
Allen Gillers
We Place Ourselves
Leyya Mona Tawil
4 Poems
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
#negrophobia
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and Kate Hess
“Bad Bitches”
Michelle Cowin-Mensah
A Butterfly in a Jar: Where the twirlers lie...
Christopher Braz
Drawings
Ralph Lemon
Infinite Work: A Selection of Writings by Biba Bell
Matthew Piper
Biba Bell:
Notes on Dancing in Detroit
Curating a Collision
MGM
Slow Work: Dance’s Temporal Effect in the Visual Sphere
How it Happened Revisted. Biba Bell in Conversation
with Matthew Piper
2 /Research /138
Blues & Roots: Fragments of a History
of the Detroit Artists Workshop
George Tysh
Photographer of a Revolution: The Girl with the
Camera, the photography of Leni Sinclair.
Emi Fontana
A Coversation with Carlos Diaz
Mary McNichols, Ph.D
3 /Drawing Detroit /174
Drawing Detroit
Jennifer Junkermeier and Ryan Harte
4 /Public Engagement /188
St. Louis County police responding to
the Ferguson Uprising...
Curtis McGuire
5 /Notes on Social Practice /194
Building on ‘Notes on Social Practice’:
On the Theoretical Unconscious of Social Practice
Hammam Aldouri
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
6 /Collections /204
In Correspondence with the Vessel:
The Collection of Joy and Allan Nachman
Addie Langford
7 /Marie T. Hermann /232
The Discreet Music of Marie T. Hermann's Objects
Michael Stone-Richards
Marie T. Hermann in Conversation
Glenn Adamson
Stillness in the Glorious Wilderness
Glenn Adamson
Toccata 570
Rebecca R. Hart
Metabolic Décor
Ezra Shales
That Which is Drawn Away
Anthony Marcellini
And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn
Shelley Selim
After M.T.H. Exhibition: And dusk turned
dawn, Blackthorn
Lynn Crawford
8 /Jessica Stoller /306
The Delicate Monster: Recent Work by Jessica Stoller
Jane Ursula Harris
9 /Tony Hepburn /316
A Midwife to Ideas: Tony Hepburn
Addie Langford
Tony Hepburn at Cranbook Academy of Art
Marsha Miro
Recent Work (Materials Pieces),
Camden Arts Center 1971
Tony Hepburn
Tony Hepburn: Vignettes
Ben Teague
Encountering Tony Hepburn
Tom Lauerman
Tony Hepburn in Correspondence
Addie Langford
Tony Hepburn. An Obituary.
Paul Kotula
10 /Susanne Hilberry /360
In Memoriam Susanne Feld Hilberry
Marsha Miro
/Reviews /364
Play Time
Kim Harty
Hamtramck Ceramck
Marissa Jezak and Jessica Newberry
DetroitResearch /On Dance
VOLUME TWO / SPRING / FALL 2016
When, sometime in 2012, Addie Langford
and I sat down with a group of friends
and former students (Biba Bell,
Jessica Newberry, Marissa Jezak, Andrew Mehall,
Dan Steadman, and Kevin Beasley) to discuss
the landscape of art writing in Detroit, there was
relatively little at the time that could be said to be more
than documentary or occasional writing, rather than
writing that sought to develop a critical language,
history, and theory about developing practices in
Detroit since the heyday of Cass Corridor artists. 1 In
order for artworks to have a future, it has been said,
not only must they be made, collected and exhibited,
they must also be written about and become part of a
discourse and conversation about value. Sometimes
the critical language is ahead of the art (as may have
been the case with New York art-writing in the 1980s
and 1990s), at other times (as was the case with
Cubism in pre-World War I Paris, say) the art is ahead
of the language and it takes decades to find the right
language and strategies for talking about the art and
its possible subjects. (One of the least compelling
things that can be said about any work of art is that it
speaks for itself, hence the largest part of any history
of art is the history of forgotten objects.) Today, as
the second volume (Spring-Fall) of Detroit Research
appears there is a veritable flowering of art writing in
Detroit as witnessed by an article by Michael Hodges
for The Detroit News when he asks, writing in April,
2015:
Want more proof of the quickening in the
Detroit art scene? Consider the small explosion
of local art journals that have popped up in the
past year or two.
“It's like mushrooms after a rain,” says Royal
Oak artist Mary Fortuna, who edited the mid-
1990s journal Ground Up. “I am delighted by
the breadth and variety, and the somethingfor-everyone
quality.”
The newest of the bunch, Detroit Research
[the most academic], just launched a month
ago, joining other recent arrivals Infinite Mile,
Essay'd, The Periphery, Detroit Art Review,
and ZIPR. 2
The landscape - the political, economic, and cultural
landscape - between 2012 and now could not be more
different: the inaugural issue of Detroit Research in
2015 began with an extended reflection on art in the
context of Detroit’s Emergency Manager Law, the
Grand Bargain (and the extraordinary role played by
the DIA and its donors therein), and art as a symptom
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
or medium of representation of social and political
tensions. The first issue of Detroit Research also
contained a brief essay by Mary Fortuna on her journal
Ground Up and the challenges facing her and her peers
in keeping up a critical reflexive practice in the Detroit
of the mid-1990s. If bankruptcy – both economic and
political – was a keynote of conversations but a few
years ago, today the conversation and cultural
landscape are markedly different: now, political and
social talk is dominated by the image of Midtown,
Downtown and environs 3 – the names are contested,
so for some “Midtown” is really “Cass Corridor” –
and the need for economic resources to reach the
neighborhoods, since it is all but agreed that the city
core of Detroit is well on its way back to economic
sustainability. Today, the conversation is race and
demographic displacement in light of vastly increased
property values; 4 likewise is the contemporary art
scene the subject of much conversation both in and
outside Detroit, and which is in no small part a function
of the considerable social and capital investment made
over many years by foundations – Kresge, Knight,
Erb and many more – and often in innovative ways.
Detroit Research, Infinite Mile, Essay’d, some of the
new forms of art writing in Detroit straddling the web
and physical copy, for example, are either recipients
of Knight Foundation Art Challenge Grants or
applicants. Since being invited to guest edit this issue
of Detroit Research on Dance, Biba Bell – about to start
her new life as Assistant Professor of Dance at Wayne
State University! – has become a Kresge Fellow (2016),
and Leni Sinclair, the great photographer of Detroit,
on whom, I am proud to say, we had long planned two
articles, has become a Kresge Eminent Artist (2016),
and the Danish-Detroit ceramicist Marie T. Hermann
(and most recently Visiting Assistant Professor
and Head of Ceramics at the College for Creative
Studies), the featured artist in this issue, is a Kresge
Fellow of 2013. It is scarce possible to think of any
accomplished artist on the Detroit scene who has not
directly or indirectly benefitted from the considerable
investment made by the foundations in the various
The launch of Detroit Research, vol. 1, MOCAD, March 2015. Photo courtesy Shanna Merola.
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
art practices of Detroit – social practice, community
arts, post-studio practice, architecture, film, music
and performance, writing, and yes, painting and
traditional studio practices. The investment in the
arts of Detroit has also, most importantly, served
to attract talent from outside Detroit and many
such people have become part of the practice – or
the politics - of staying, as Rick Lowe of Project Row
Houses has so tellingly put this as the core of any idea
of social practice. For these and many more reasons –
some of them structural, to be sure – the writing and
conversation about art in Detroit has qualitatively
changed since this journal was but a conception and
the many forms of art writing now available testify to
this change, are, indeed, themselves both symptoms
and agents of such change. The local economies of art
and art writing are reaching a new complexity and so
inevitably will seek to capture different if overlapping
concerns and this issue of Detroit Research devoted
to dance and ceramics, with a tribute to the late Tony
Hepburn, former Artist-in-Residence in Ceramics at
Cranbrook, will be our attempt to give representation
and visibility to an emerging discourse, as well as to
join with our friends in other new art writing ventures
in building new archives for the future (l’à-venir, that
which is yet to come).
For its part, Detroit Research aims to situate the
recent art practices of Detroit within a national and
international setting: we expect each issue to reflect
this dialogue between the national and international
even more beginning with volume 3 devoted to The
Art of Sound, to be guest-edited by the inter-media
artists Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus of
the Detroit-based electronic band Adult., and will
include, we hope, Kevin Beasley, as the featured artist
(to be curated by Dick Goody and Monica Bowman),
and essays by the great French curator Jean-Hubert
Martin, and the French philosopher and art historian
Georges Didi-Huberman. In each issue we shall have
a historical section on a Detroit journal or art event
(in this volume George Tysh writes on the Detroit
Artists Workshop with photography by Leni Sinclair),
a Detroit art collection (here Addie Langford writes
on the Joy and Allan Nachman collection; Taylor
Aldridge will be our next writer on a significant art
collection), and topics on drawing Detroit, public
engagement, social practice, and Biopolitics. The aim
is not simply to capture or to report or describe but
to develop a critical language anchored in Detroit’s
emerging art practices as the basis of a critical theory
of social practice broadly conceived since “life too is a
form of art [approached through] the study of places
and people.” 5
Many individuals, communities, and institutions
combined have worked together to make Detroit
Research possible. First and foremost, we should like
to acknowledge the crucial interest of Katy Locker,
Knight Foundation Program Director for Detroit and
the indispensable support of the Knight Foundation
in the form of a Knight Art Challenge Grant in 2015.
With volume 2, Detroit Research is produced in
collaboration with the College for Creative Studies
(CCS) whose President Rick Rogers has given
unstinting support along with Nina Holden, VP of
Institutional Advancement at CCS and her colleague
Shannon McPartlon, Director of Foundation
Relations, at CCS. Sooshin Choi and Vince Carducci,
Provost and Dean respectively of CCS, have also been
highly supportive of this project. Many artists and
friends across the community - and indeed beyond
Detroit - have also donated artwork, money, and time
to make this project possible, amongst them those we
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
have come to consider as our Founding Members (or
Art Angels): Barbara Estrin, Dr. Norris and Mrs. M.
Langford, Marie T. Hermann, Jane Schulak, Gayle
and Andrew Camden, Marc Schwartz, Toby Barlow,
Marsha Miro, Linda Dresner, Lois Cohn, McArthur
Binion, Michael E. Smith, Scott Hocking, Vievee
Francis, Nicola Kuperus, Adam Lee Miller, Chris Tysh,
George Tysh, Paul Kotula, Greg Fadell, and Biba Bell.
The Episcopal Cathedral Church of St Paul Detroit, and
the Rev. Dr. William Danaher, Rector of the Episcopal
Christ Church, Cranbrook were generous in their
support of this project. We have also been fortunate to
receive corporate support from Avanti Press and Wells
Fargo. To the gallerists Michelle Perron of Center
Galleries, CCS, Hazel Blake of the Susanne Hilberry
Gallery, Christine Schefman of the David Klein
Gallery, and Simone DeSousa of the Simone DeSousa
Gallery we express our heartfelt thanks for their
continued support. Dr. Nii O. Quarcoopome, Co-Chief
Curator of the DIA, was exceptionally generous of his
time in helping us with several key works from the
Ceramics Collection of the DIA for use in our section
on the work of Marie T. Hermann. The design work for
Detroit Research has been a labor of love and the team
that pulled it together nothing less than exceptional:
our lead designer Joshua Smith, Assistant Editors
Marissa Jezak and Jessica Newberry, our web designer
Curtis McGuire, and our social media / Indiegogo
magician Kristin Wellmer. All are alums of the
College for Creative Studies – and as it happens,
all have worked in Critical Theory at CCS and their
continued presence through the journal will be
felt as the College makes steps toward the invention
of new approaches to Critical Studies. I cannot thank
them enough. The list could continue – and will need
to do so if the journal is to be produced at this level –
but it is sufficient to show what it has taken to make
this work possible.
Michael Stone-Richards
Editor, Detroit Research
Chair, Committee on Critical Studies
College for Creative Studies
2 Michael Hodges, “New Journals showcase Detroit Art
Scene,” The Detroit News (April 14, 2015).
3 When will someone write a cultural essay on the new
restaurants (and restaurant architecture) of Detroit as
image of the changing relations to the suburbs and the
image of Detroit to itself?
4 Since, however, nothing is simple, cf. Kelefa Sanneh,
1 In 2007, Craig Fahle at WDET’s Detroit Today, convened a
panel discussion on arts writing in Detroit in the light of the
recent opening of MOCAD in 2006 and new developments on
the art scene. Listen to a recording of that conversation with
Nick Sousanis, Rebecca Mazzei, George Tysh, and Michael
Stone-Richards here at http://www.michaelstonerichards.
com/audio.html
“Is Gentrification really a Problem?” The New Yorker
(July 11 and 18, 2016), http://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/2016/07/11/is-gentrification-really-a-problem.
Accessed 08-01-16, and Michael Stone-Richards,
“Thoughts Propadeutic to Talking about Gentrification,
or, The Coruscant Effect,” Infinite Mile, no. 16 (April 2016),
http://infinitemiledetroit.com/Thoughts_Propaedeutic_to_
Talking_about_Gentrification,_or,_The_Coruscant_Effect.
html. Accessed 08-01-16.
5 Arthur Symons, “Preface,” Plays, Acting, and Music
(London: Constable & Company, 1909), viii.
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
1
/On
Dance
DetroitResearch /On Dance
On Dance: A Politics of Rhythm
/ MICHAEL STONE-RICHARDS
The abstract thinker, to whom the question of practical morality is indifferent,
has always loved dancing, as naturally as the moralist has hated it.
Arthur Symons, “The World as Ballet,” 1906
I
At the end of February into early March of 2015, there
occurred in Detroit an art event that for many of us
was of a kind of which one will either say, “I was there,”
or, “I was not there.” Biba Bell, dancer-choreographer-scholar –
the very image of what the new dance studies since Judson has
sought to produce – mounted a choreography called It never
really happened (Part One), a site-specific dance made to be
executed in a fifth-floor corner apartment of the Pavilion high
rise designed by Mies van de Rohe. (Matthew Piper, with our
friends at Infinite Mile, produced a long and rich conversation
with Bell about the origin of this work and the concepts
explored through it, of which we reproduce an edited version
in this issue of Detroit Research. 1 ) The question of where and
when the dance began was built into the invitation itself (hence
the video of the dance begins with the outside of the building)
since there was a strict interval for arrival at the high-rise
building and for access to the apartment, where, upon arrival,
one was met by a hostess, performed by Nicola Kuperus, who
provided drinks and pointed one to the limited seating along
two walls, the other two planes of the room being sheet-glass
opening onto the nature and sky of Lafayette Park. The mixing
of guests and party-talk was also part of the performance – we,
as “audience,” would not be told, The performance is about to
start – very much like the choreography of party guests in Maya
Deren’s great mytho-poetic dance film Ritual in Transfigured
Time (black and white, 1946) where the use of slow motion and
freeze-frame serves precisely to expose to view the underlying
repetition of habits (of greetings and welcome) as already a
structuring choreography at once ordinary and latent with
ritual force and alterity (imagine, say, the Greek demand for
hospitality since one may never know that one is not meeting
a god), something signaled in the film’s language by the use
of negative light to mark the phenomenon of experience as
transition. The appearance of Biba Bell the performer simply
signaled the transition to another stage or phase of the dance.
We are fortunate in having a recording of the dance available
on the Detroit Research website – or at least a partial recording
– since not only the dance itself but the sound work composed
for the performance would need to be grasped for the fullness
of the work and its engagements to be articulated. And what
are these engagements? With It never really happened (Part
One), Bell made the most astonishing presentation of her work
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
and thought yet: presence of bodies to bodies (the compactness
of party-goers, the compactness of sitting on a bench with no
protective social space in between guests), post-studio dance,
the investigation of architecture, the foregrounding of an
aesthetics of domesticity as also an architecture of domesticity
(and what could be more domestic and yet intertextual than the
witty transposition of Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie to a Foot
Dance 2 ), and, in the final scene of Bell’s performance consisting
of a slow walking movement with the left hand of the dancer
moving along the two planes of sheet-glass, the appearance of
the trace upon the misted glass of the apartment as signal of
many other traces (of negative space, bodies, party detritus).
For the closing stages of the dance the hostess, having been led
slowly by the principal performer to a place of uneventfulness,
sits in stillness and looks on without affect, and it is difficult
not to see her as both audience and subject of the dance, at
once alienated and engaged, living only in movement. (But
what is life if not self-movement?) There was an intensity of
movement and presence without, though, the heaviness which
can scarce any longer be taken without irony; but above all, the
architecture of the compact – situation, room, and consent –
left one unable not to feel the affective embodiment of a shared
arc of desolation, mourning, celebration, and resignation.
Bodies generate metaphorical associations – trans-port – and
for this viewer, the ending tracing along steamed-up glass
evoked the poetry of clouds in a Baudelaire or the tradition
of mono no aware, at the same time that it made one feel the
affective and hence social depletion. It was an experience that
no one present would have missed, as the compact carried over
into re-entering the night of the city of Detroit.
Biba Bell, It Never Really Happened, 2015. Photo print.
Biba Bell, Who Me House, 2004.
/On Dance
II
Introducing this volume I observed that the mission that
Detroit Research has set itself is to situate the recent art
practices of Detroit within a national and international setting.
Maya Stovall, Liquor Store Theater, 2014.
18/19
DetroitResearch /On Dance
Our aim is not simply to capture or to report or describe
the current art of the city but to develop a critical language
anchored in Detroit’s emerging art practices as the basis of a
critical theory of social practice broadly conceived since “life
too is a form of art [approached through] the study of places and
people.” 3 The material gathered by Biba Bell On Dance for this
volume captures to perfection this ambition in an innovative
reflection on a city known for many things – the Motown
sound pre-eminently – but not dance, at least experimental
art dance, since Bell and her collaborators take dance as this
is now understood in the most compelling contemporary - that
is, post-Judson – appreciation as intervention, research into
acts of historically conditioned forms of social embodiment,
articulation, and movement. An excellent example of this
conception of dance is Bell’s own work – at once performance,
dance, and non-dance 4 - called Who Me House from 2004 in
which the performer, Bell herself, is enframed in a vitrine:
the body is framed, and movement is entrained and limited,
and the domestic acts of walking and shifting around within
a constrained space become the subjects of looking-at (and
looking-in running the risk of being looked-through) at the
same time that such loaded looking-at (gazing) becomes the
subject of the investigation through the dance/performance.
At another remove the liminal boundaries between dance,
performance, and “mere” movement announce the subject of
the work as liminality in the social sphere as the frame removes
body and performer from the anchoring of the everyday yet
still subject to the gaze from the place of the everyday (the
viewers). The conception of dance at work in these studies
and interventions gathered by Bell is one in which, as with
Who Me House, enframing gives moments and processes of
the everyday over to the pressures of exposure. Discontinuity,
then, or inter-ruption (into and from), is the mark of this deconstructive
dance.
III
In Bell’s essays and interventions in On Dance the work of the
great choreographer-dancer Ralph Lemon, for example, along
with the Danish Mårten Spångberg, 5 is situated alongside
Detroit choreographer Maya Stovall and artist Hamilton Poe’s
photo-essay on “terry2day” and further work on Voguing
and Arab-American experimentalism in movement forms.
What emerges – and this is especially so in the conversation
between Stovall and Bell, and Matthew Piper’s dossier of Bell’s
own writings – is the way in which dance grasped as research
permits for a new understanding and image of the city, in this
case, Detroit, the idea of Detroit as the poet Jim Gustafson
famously formulated it. The (social) choreography of Terry
captured by photography in “terry2day” is Detroit at a certain
angle but also more than this as movement becomes discourse
in an expanded materialist conception of dance relative to
the City (whose locations, places, and space are conceptually
grasped as the negative of theatre forms and space, hence
Bell’s preoccupation with what it might mean to practice a
post-studio (inter-ruptive, discontinuous) form of dance). For
Poe, but also Maya Stovall’s Liquor Store Theatre intervention,
this form of dance in the expanded field is a means of grasping
the body at the intersection of power and exclusion in order to
show culture in transition, or to make visible the contradictory
and complex (repressive and negating) movements of power
inscribed across corporeality. The new dance studies in which
Bell has been formed – the work of Sally Banes, Susan Leigh
Foster, Susan Manning, and Bell’s own mentor André Lepecki
– grasps dance as a cognitive and methodological medium
capable of wide application and generalization (consider, for
example, the title of Susan Leigh Foster’s famous anthology
Choreographing History 6 ), 7 indeed, a tool of study where the
body of dance is the depository of traces and forces of ideology,
history and potentiality. Dance in the most conventional
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
understanding of the art form, shapes forces – of seduction, of
vision, of attraction and repulsion – but dance is also, in the
larger expanded field of movement off-stage, the image and
medium of larger interlocking impersonal forces (attraction
and repulsion) of power that shape and direct lives at the
unconscious level. This is what Frank Kermode was driving
at in his essay on the aestheticism of dance in the 1890s when
he observed that “[The Modern Dance] depends always upon
the body – upon the power of the body – not to express emotion
but to objectify a pattern of sentience.” 8 This unconscious
level can be that of the tacit domain of Edward T. Hall, where,
again, the image of dance is no mere image (or metaphor) but
medium. As Hall himself wrote in The Dance of Life, “It can
now be said with assurance that individuals are dominated in
their behavior by complex hierarchies of interlocking rhythms.
1 Cf. Matthew Piper, “How it Happened: A Conversation with Biba
Bell about her Apartment Dance,” Infinite Mile, no. 16 (April 2015),
http://infinitemiledetroit.com/How_It_Happened_(a_conversation_
with_Biba_Bell_about_her_apartment_dance)_01.html. Accessed
08.01.16
2 Cf. Yvonne Rainer, Hand Movie, 1966, available on YouTube at https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuArqL7r1WQ. Accessed 08-13-16.
3 Arthur Symons, “Preface,” Plays, Acting, and Music (London:
Constable & Company, 1909), viii.
4 An important aspect of the work of choreographers such as Pina
Bausch and Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker is precisely the question
of the shift between dance and performance.
5 Cf. Lindsey Winship, “Mårten Spångberg, the Bad Boy of
Contemporary Dance,” The Guardian (July 5, 2013), https://www.
theguardian.com/stage/2013/jul/05/marten-spangberg-epic-dance.
Accessed 08-01-16.
6 Cf. Susan Leigh Foster, ed., Choreographing History (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995).
7 The historiography of such a conception of dance as life itself is
[…] I am convinced that it will ultimately be proved that almost
every facet of human behavior is involved in the rhythmic
process,” 9 which is to say that Hall believes that the movement
of social life – and life itself – is dance, and so the study of
dance a study of the forms of life. The idea of dance explored
in these pages is nothing less than a politics of rhythm. 10 As I
complete the editing of this volume, which is to say, the viewing
of artwork and the reading of texts – many times over, like a
performance – I have come to a view, I shall not call it an insight,
at least I shall not insist on it, namely, that the works of Leni
Sinclair (more and more the photographer of Detroit) shares
long indeed – stretching back to Hindu conceptions of the universe
as embodied in Shiva and importantly re-worked in the poetry
of T.S. Eliot – but in its more modern form would encompass the
aestheticism of dance from Mallarmé through Yeats and Valéry to an
Adrian Stokes in England , as also the Cambridge Ritualists with its
American offshoots including a Ralph Ellison, and the expansion of
anthropology to a saturated conception of everyday life to be found
in the works of such as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner and many
others. The post-Judson inflection consists in the conception of
materialism at work in the methodology.
8 Frank Kermode, “Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev,” in What is
Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and
Marshall Cohen (New York: OUP, 1983), 158. My emphases. The only
question is how one might interpret the origins and significance
(social? historical? political?) of the patterns of sentience.
9 Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press,
/On Dance
much with the conception of dance at work in Bell’s vision (we
would need the mediation of Anna Halprin and Simone Forti
to make sense of this), for with the frame necessary to art in
the Western tradition there comes in the work of Sinclair and
the dance presented in Bell’s collaborators in this volume the
multitudinous and various sense of forms of life interlocking,
overlapping, dissolving, re-appearing – and resisting. It almost
makes one want to re-read Deleuze. ■
1983), 141.
10 It is regrettable that no translation is yet available of what is arguably
the most penetrating work on the politics of rhythm, a work of
incomparably greater insight than anything to be found in Henri
Lefebvre’s ruminations on rhythm, namely, Henri Meschonnic’s
Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (Lagrasse:
Verdier, 1982) .
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
A Dancerly
Divining Rod
/ Biba Bell
[D]ance, as a scenic event, is directly shaped by such
a structure. Its own works have no other milieu of
existence but the scène, and this one, as we hope to
show, is nothing else but a structure of contemporaneity
and therefore a structure of temporality. 1
Similarly to how she flexes her muscles, a person flexes
her surroundings—both are with her and of her always. 2
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Dance is in and of its scene. Setting, mise en scène, or
theatrical context, perhaps we could imagine choreography
itself, an “apparatus of capture,” as one
of dance’s primary scenes. 3 Choreography moves us into the
frame of the architectural, the topo-geographic, and the social.
Expanding the scene, all the world’s stage, we continuously move
with and against the world. Dance takes place through its refusal
to stay in place. Rhythmic, gravitational, corporeal, affective,
dance moves us. The dancer partners the city in what might event
a Jacobs-esque sidewalk pas de deux or it could look more like a
social choreographic act of resistance. Here, the city is all that
it contains: an ensemblic sphere of bodies, vehicles, buildings,
green spaces, day and nighttime rituals, economies of circulation
and capital, of desires and relations, discourse, difference, and
the rich, layered strata of historical memory. Frédéric Pouillaude,
quoted above, invests the scène as a structure of temporality predicated
on contemporaneity and, thus, contingent co-existence.
The dancerly scene requires this essential co-existensivity and,
tuning into its eventness, this is a nexus across which multiple
temporalities converge. It is a multivocal and complex terrain—
marked, grooved, uneven, populated, and replete with potentiality.
Choreographically, it is a space of inscription that puts
into practice the many ways bodies organize and are organized.
floor—four-on-the-floor—“Every cell knows where down is.
Easily forgotten.” 4 From the ground up, let us dance with improvisational
quickness, dexterity, urgency, enjoyment, and care.
* * *
Setting the scene. It was a Sunday morning in March in 2013
when Ralph Lemon and I shared a memorable walk around a
very special building in Detroit: the Motown Museum on Grand
Boulevard. Ralph was visiting Detroit as a guest artist at the University
where I teach. Approximately twelve years earlier, when
we’d first met, he had been deeply engaged in a process of “backyard”
research through the American South. During this period,
which came to form Come Home Charlie Patton, the third part
of his seminal Geography Trilogy, he investigated intersections
between identity, race, and geography. 5 Dance offered a means
by which to peer into and map the silent memories of history,
a corporeal divining rod detecting history’s ephemeral voices,
and invoke what José Medina refers to as “people who remember
against the grain.” 6 Music was also central to this journey. At the
time of our Detroit outing, Ralph had recently curated a performance
series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that
took its title from a gospel song, “Some Sweet Day,” and
sparked lively discussions about what happens when dance
steps into the aesthetic, economic context of the museum.
/On Dance
Conjure the image of dancer as alchemist, ambassador, or ninja.
Whether feeling the rub in a tight, sweaty room or bounding
across open-air, grassy lots, there is a way that the body moves
to reset the stakes in a site, shift its fault lines, and dis-articulate
spatial stratifications. At times these are exalted, extraordinary
feats and at times simply everyday, ambulatory play. This figure
is one of many, never quite alone, calling and responding to an
ensemble of dancers past, present, and future who join together
in rhythm, breath, and energy. Yvonne Rainer once noted that
dance is very difficult to see. Instead, can you feel it? Hear it?
Tap-tap, slide, chassé, step, step, stumble—feet against the
Needless to say, I expectantly anticipated our visit to Hitsville
USA. For me, coupled with the Rouge River Plant, the site endures
as a fertile archive of Detroit’s significant contributions to dance
history. While some might argue that dance is not the focus of
the Motown legacy, unless of course we are talking with the ghost
of Cholly Atkins in the room, it is a major presence in its scene.
Dancing in the streets, music is catchy—an enduring vessel for
dancerly contagions. Gordy took this into account and choreography’s
house was established in the compound wherein some of the
most significant performers of the 20th century were nurtured.
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Dance offers an important lens to flesh out the very real, virtuosic
ways these artists engaged the politics of embodiment and identity
as they traversed multiple spaces and aesthetic economies.
Additionally, this scene resonates with a number of themes that
run through my own scholarly and artistic research: performance,
affective labor, and domestic space. That Sunday morning
we pulled into the funeral home parking lot next door, got out
of my jeep, and found, to our dismay, that the museum was closed.
Instead of driving away we stood on the front lawn and read the
historical plaque detailing the landmark site. A display window
on the front of the East sitting house advertised the current
exhibition. A trip to the museum is invariably furnished with a
tour, and through the years I’ve come to remember a bit of script,
which that morning I tried to relate to Ralph. I pointed to some
of the other houses in the neighborhood that once formed the
extended Motown compound, including a big white home two
doors down (“the money house”) where artists went to get paid.
I described Gordy’s private residence in the upstairs apartment
and its 60s style modernism, remembering an image of what
might have been a forrmica tabletop or a plastic cup filled with
resin to look like a half finished glass of pop. We began to circle
the building, peering into windows and over fences, running our
hands across the painted brick walls, and made our way around
the house to the back alley where the garage had been converted
into Hitsville’s legendary Studio B with help from Gordy’s father.
From this vantage I did my best to remember what was inside: the
location of the piano, the recording booth, a wall-hook where the
Temptations hung their coats, a suspended microphone under
which a young Diana Ross. The home came alive for us as we
imagined elated play coupled with diligent work. We patiently
solicited its memories, listening for that echo-y Motown sound
and hoping for a bridge. Our methodical choreography circling
the homes lasted for close to 30 minutes. Pedestrians passed by,
walking along the boulevard, and perhaps wondered what we,
two dancers, two researchers, two friends, were doing creeping
around that house, a mecca of Detroit’s performance history.
* * *
As I worked through ideas, thoughts, and desires toward this
issue of Detroit Research, I began to orbit a number of questions:
How might a choreographic sensibility and/or dancerly
practice cohere in a way that is distinctively Detroit? And how
can a choreographic lens offer an expanded sense of Detroit’s
geography, as a socio-economic and historical terrain as well as a
current or movement or mood inflecting discursive and aesthetic
terrain? What would this look, sound, or feel like? Who can tell
this story? The contributions to this issue of Detroit Research
respond to these questions in diverse, urgent, and sometimes
celebratory ways: artist/scholar and fourth generation Detroiter
Maya Stovall’s choreo-ethnographic Liquor Store Theatre project;
Danish [working in Sweden] choreographer, performer, and
theorist Mårten Spångberg’s manifesto on art and culture within
the machinery of capitalism; Hamilton Poe’s crowd-sourced
photographic essay documenting the daily dances of a well known
figure in Midtown Detroit’s swiftly gentrifying neighborhood;
architect Allen Gillers’ mobile architectures that act as proposals
for LGBTQ urban and affective commons; a score by improviser
and choreographer Leyya Mona Tawil exploring experimental
narrative in Arab American performance; Detroit born, Nigerian
American performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s
poetic, performative texts and images excerpted from his recent
performance piece “#negrophobia”; Theater and performance
studies scholar Michelle Cowin-Mensah’s analysis of the performance
of race and gender in Detroit’s notorious White Party;
dancer and Detroit native Christopher Braz’s personal essay on
voguing and belonging; and, lastly, a small collection of Ralph
Lemon’s drawings that offer homage to Detroit’s music legacy.
In look and sound and feel, the work in this issue dances across
disciplinary aisles—scholarly writing, drawings, photography,
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
scores, reflections, poetry. Dance functions as both subject
matter and methodological strategy, exemplary as an aesthetic
point of entry into a range of intangibilities relating to place,
identity, history, and art. One foot in front of the other, we enter
the scene. We must, as Stovall stresses, have some skin in the
game. Is dance so difficult to see? Perhaps dance helps make
visible that which is very difficult to see. Sometimes we have to
denaturalize the dance to see the dancer (or vice versa) shuffling
his or her scene or, rather, opening up his or her scene through
a shuffle, step, step, slide, pivot, twist, twirl. Dancing across
aisles, outside of (disciplinary) houses and onto the street, can be
risky. But it also reveals how movement is imbued with choreopolitical
potential, dynamically placing us in the present and
with one another. 7 As we move with and against the city with
courage, care, and criticality, let dance be our divining rod. ■
/On Dance
4 From a transcription of Steve Paxton leading his “Small Dance,” aka
1 Frédéric Pouillaude, “Scène and Contemporary,” in Planes of
Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global, ed. Jenn Joy and
André Lepecki (New York: Seagull Books, 2009), 179.
2 Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: The
University of Alabama Press, 2002), 40.
3 Choreography is referred to in relation to the term “apparatus”
by numerous scholars, notably André Lepecki in his discussion
of choreography as an “apparatus of capture.” Gerald Siegmund’s
theorization is also highly instructive in expanding the frame of
choreography (which can be etymologically defined as a bodily
writing) to include the entire scenic event. Siegmund explicates
this apparatus as a structure that produces attention as it also
holds bodies in place: “It stages our bodies to bring them into
existence.” Gerald Siegmund, “Apparatus, Attention and the Body:
The Theatre Machines of Boris Charmatz,” in Planes of
Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global, ed. Jenn Joy and
André Lepecki (New York: Seagull Books, 2009), 334.
“The Stand,” Contact Quarterly, 11.1 (Winter 1986).
5 Cf. Ralph Lemon, Come Home Charlie Patton (Middleton: Wesleyan
University Press, 2013), 180..
6 José Medina, “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance:
Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism,” Foucault
Studies, no. 12 (October 2011): 9-35, 12.
7 The term “choreopolitical,” theorized by André Lepecki, articulates
the impact of embodied, agential resistance to the current, often urban,
realities of choreopolicing, wherein the potential movement of bodies
and thus subjects is regulated through spatial demarcation, in that within
certain spaces the only movements allowed are those preassigned for
“‘proper’ circulation.” Choreopolitical movements such as the decision
to not move and occupy a space indicate an aesthetic range of how
these (what I am calling) dancerly actions might appear. André Lepecki,
“Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer,” in TDR:
The Drama Review, 57.4 (Winter 2013): 13-27, 20.
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Liquor Store Theater:
Dancing with Gentrification in
post-Bankruptcy Detroit
/ Maya Stovall
Liquor Store Theatre (LST) offers a window into Detroit’s
post-bankruptcy gentrification process. In McDougall-
Hunt, where the project began, there is a liquor store on just
about every corner; on some blocks, there is one on each
corner and also one or more in the middle of the block. This
is a neighborhood with upwards of a sixty percent vacancy
rate in which viable businesses are sparse, public gathering
spaces such as parks and plazas are virtually nonexistent
save for community gardens run by residents, and even the
most minimal city infrastructure such as bus stop benches
and street lights are so rare as to be sumptuous objects.
All images courtesy of the artist
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
26/27
DetroitResearch /On Dance
The liquor stores in McDougall-Hunt are not sumptuous, for
their habitualness within the landscape. Generally, with some
exceptions, these stores are run by immigrant families who work
long hours in the city, commuting from various suburbs and
working a twelve hour plus shift from mid-morning to late night.
The majority of the McDougall-Hunt liquor stores are in decrepit
condition. The facades are pronounced with provisional signage,
once brightly colored and now sun-faded hand painted block
letters offering promises of "ice cold beer," "hot sandwiches,"
"chicken gizzards," and "lotto." Grit-stained sidewalks are littered
with windblown trash, splinters of broken glass and concrete
crumbles of potholes bursting between the seasons dot the
driveways and walkways. It’s fascinating that these unkempt
stores peddling limited goods are so incredibly plentiful in a
twenty-first century American city. What attracted me to these
stores, as much as the repetitive, hypnagogic landscape offered
by the stores themselves on block after block, is the coming
and the going – the movement of people through the small
sidewalk, street, and parking lot spaces surrounding the stores.
There are conversations, business transactions, exchanges of
information, expressions of leisure and festivity, an ongoing
negotiation of time, space and place. This is what I consider a
theater – a site of contestation, action, and reaction – that is
already present in front of the store, and I imagine has been,
long before McDougall-Hunt and its liquor stores became a site
of the choreo-ethnographic project that is LST.
Upon repeated observation of McDougall-Hunt liquor stores
in the summer, right away one notices the presence of public
characters, à la Jane Jacobs, 1 on the sidewalks surrounding the
stores. Although there is a steady flow of customers from within
the neighborhood and including those passing through the
neighborhood, some of the same men and women daily dot the
parking lot and sidewalks of the neighborhood. To understand
the importance of the happenings in these small urban spaces,
it is helpful to view the overall context. In McDougall-Hunt,
opportunity is thin and seldom; joblessness outnumbers those
who are employed; poverty is the norm. McDougall-Hunt’s
median income is approximately $13,000, its unemployment
rate is officially upwards of twenty-one percent, obviously much
higher in reality when observing the neighborhood, over sixtyfive
percent of residents are living below the federal poverty line,
and the urban renewal which has landed in Downtown Detroit
just two miles west has professedly ignored McDougall-Hunt and
its sweeping vacancy. In a neighborhood strapped for resources,
viable urban spaces become a gathering place for those who
are impacted by the neo-liberal policies of Detroit which leave
swaths of the city like this one unstirred by private and public
investment. In a neighborhood where infrastructure, jobs,
and decent housing are largely absent, what is left to study?
People are left. Time, space, and place are left. The study of
performance of people who are traditionally marginalized by
classification – whether socio-economic, ethnoracial, gender,
or some combination of these identification tensions – allows
a study of contention. The study of the time-space, and place
surrounding the liquor store allows a view into a private/public
dichotomy and a view into the remnants and the beginnings in
cycles of capitalism and flexible accumulation. In some of the
seemingly most anonymous places of Detroit neighborhoods
– the sidewalks surrounding its party stores – a story of
gentrification in post-bankruptcy Detroit is found.
Our staged dance performances on the grit-encrusted sidewalks
of Detroit invite residents to speak about life in the city.
The documentary films show a facet of city life that is both
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
poetic and starkly honest. I have feelings of skepticism and
ambivalence toward helicopter researchers and artists landing in
neighborhoods to extract information and ideas from residents
and subsequently write articles, monographs, and books, or
produce works, based upon weeks or even days of one-sided,
outsider-centered research. Spending a few days somewhere
would allow a researcher or artist to become an “expert” on the
neighborhood or the phenomenon at hand. As a fourth-generation
Detroiter I have been skeptical of newcomers seeking to extract
Detroit-ness without infusing their own skin in the game (that
is, “skin” other than just money) – without being vulnerable,
accessible, and engaged with the working-class people who have
inhabited this city before it became a city du jour. Although
I’m from this place, I don’t want to simply take from Detroit – I
want to dance with it in a way that challenges assumptions. The
dancing in LST challenges the gaze – it challenges the idea of
a helicopter researcher/artist. By engaging on the street in
performance – the very act which the project seeks to study –
Liquor Store Theater challenges recapitulated categories of
"participant," "researcher," "audience," and "performance."
I begin each LST event with a staged dance performance, in
which a series of choreographed pieces are presented while
videographer Eric Johnston captures the footage and Martha
Johnston captures stills. Conceptual artist Todd “Quaint”
Stovall produces LST music, visual art elements, and also shoots.
Quaint’s artistic presence and input are integral to LST. During
this phase, many of those present on the sidewalks and streets
around the store become interested and watch, while many others
still, jaded by city life or otherwise preoccupied with their own
doings, ignore us. LST, at times, feels like a celebration. The
city as a party, after Lefebvre. 2 Indeed, we have started a party
of some kind – or perhaps continued and provoked a party. I am
blurring the lines between work and play, public and private,
maybe life and death in a city. Those who do become interested
in the staged performance are then invited to continue the
dialogue which the dance started through an interview. After
viewing a dance performance, people are more apt to dialogue. I
ask questions about performance generally and in particular with
respect to the participant’s life, using theatrical performance
as a prompt and a point of vulnerability for a researcher who is
typically in the dominant position. We discuss Detroit as a ballet,
/On Dance
28/29
DetroitResearch /On Dance
the neighborhood as a ballet, and the participant’s own view of
the role of performance in everyday life. Both the disclosures
of fact, and the actual performance and delivery of interview
participants are important. The dialoguing between the dance
as a cognitive prompt and the interview that follows are critical
to the authenticity and integrity of the project. The durational
framework of the project – coming and performing in the LST
events over time in a neighborhood, as well as the vulnerable
position of being under surveillance which the dancing allows me
to assume, makes the project more dialogic. The pure presence
which dancers bring represents an investment in time and
space that is intended to mitigate the voyeurism that urban
ethnography connotes. I am breathing in the elegantly furling
second-hand smoke of those holding court at the liquor store as
I dance with the residents of post-bankruptcy Detroit. Although
the position of privilege conferred to an artist and researcher
in an impoverished city cannot be un-inscribed, I also cannot
be un-inscribed as female, of color, and daughter of this city.
LST allows me to dance with this city in a way that builds on
theory, challenges the global gaze cast upon "Detroit" and upon
the "other," and investigates the rich scene of performance in
urban spaces and places.
This summer, LST continued to explore in the neighborhood now
known as Midtown. Many of the cluster of neighborhoods in the
area known as Midtown are in the throws of the gentrification
process – LST will investigate what this looks like in small
urban spaces through the lens of dance and performance. A
theatrical exchange between researcher and participant allows
the story of a city to be told. I close my eyes, take a deep breath,
and envision a Dali-esque surreal performance in front of the
liquor store across the street from my studio apartment. I join
the performance, entering slowly with a waltz step. LST provides
a window through which to tell the story of a city in transition.
The story is already there, the performances are happening now
as I write these words. What I most want to be clear is that the
city doesn’t need any of us – it needs only to dance. ■
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
1 Urban planner and urban space theorist Jane Jacobs introduced
the concept of public characters in 1961, in her text, The Death
and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs also wrote on the notion
of the city as a ballet. Cf. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of
Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
2 The right to the city is a theory of urban space asserted by
French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre first in 1968. In
Lefebvre’s text, Le Droit à la ville, the idea of the right to the city
is pronounced as a general demand for continuous, dynamic
access to city life and its resources/amenities. Cf. Henri Lefebvre,
Le Droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968).
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
BELL & STOVALL
IN CONVERSATION
Biba Bell: I’ve been looking at the Liquor Store Theatre videos
on your website and there are so many things that I want to talk
about, but I also want this conversation to give me a sense of
the nuts and bolts or overarching structures and thoughts that
have been moving you, moving with you, and emerging from
this process.
To start, watching you dance in front of the liquor stores in
Detroit, there are two things going on: 1) You’re performing and
2) You’re doing ethnographic research. You’re talking to people,
weaving stories together, and positioning yourself within a
complex terrain between theater and anthropology, performer
and researcher, praxis and theory (that legendary birth place
of performance studies). At the same time you’re onsite of the
street, the parking lot, the community meeting space of the
liquor store, a complex terrain of exposure and encounter.
Prominent to me while watching this collection of videos (Liquor
Store Theatre Vol.1, No. 1-5) is the fact that you are putting
yourself in the position to be seen and looked at… as an object of
the gaze as it relates to a history of performance and dance. The
gaze, historically seeking to stabilize relations between subjects
and their (desired) objects, could instead be performatively
negotiated as a kind of resistance or deferral. I’m reminded of
Fred Moten’s discussion of Adrian Piper, who averts this art
historical gaze and messes with the beholder. For Moten, the force
of resistance is articulated by the gaze-turned-glance, where
glancing includes the minutia of socialized reflex evident in the
move to turn or look away. He writes that “[b]eholding is always the
entrance into a scene, into the context of the other, of the object.” 1
You seem to be at once critiquing and deflecting this gaze as it
converges within the Liquor Store Theatre (LST) both on the
site of your own body and the ethnographic scene. Through
performing these dances you are repositioning and shifting that
focus, remobilizing and projecting it out into the world, with
the folks that have collected, convene, interact, and mingle in
this space in front of the liquor store. I want to talk about this.
Perhaps the best way to engage that question is for you to tell me
about what brought you to this project. This particular series of
videos begin in 2014, what are the steps that have led you here?
Maya Stovall: This idea of the gaze is critical to the project
and it’s critical to what’s happening in Detroit right now. After
being invisible for decades, Detroit now is the object of a global
gaze in a variety of ways, and that’s the really big context.
Studying and problematizing the gentrification process is
what I want to do. Then, getting back to this idea of the gaze
in performance and performance studies and the same idea
of the gaze and ethnography and the anthropological gaze and
how all of these discursive categories of the gaze intersect at
LST, is the idea of telling the story of Detroit’s transformation.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Not in a way that privileges transformation or gentrification in
a positive or negative light but just the factual post-bankruptcy
gentrification process. Using the paradigm of performance, from
the quotidian to the formal theatrical, as a frame, is the idea,
with a purpose towards changing or shifting or problematizing,
of challenging assumed categories of “researcher,” “performer,”
“participant,” and “interviewee.” Ultimately, I want to talk to
people. I want to learn the way that people… how historically
marginalized people show up and make spaces. How performance
is deployed in urban spaces — the classification struggles in the
field of power à la [Pierre] Bourdieu; 2 the negotiation of the
right to the city à la [Henri] Lefebvre and [David] Harvey; 3
and through the lens of carnal sociology and practice theory à
la [Loïc] Wacquant, 4 and, I argue, [Katherine] Dunham 5 in the
1930s and 40s before the term “practice theory” was coined. I
guess I’m getting into the theoretical framework. This idea
of practice theory and carnal sociology and ethnography…
It’s like a little theater that provides the framework to the theater
of post-bankruptcy, neo-liberal Detroit. LST captures these
little slices of life as they unfold in the sidewalks surrounding
liquor stores. I have been focused on McDougall-Hunt for the first
year of the project, am currently working in the Midtown area,
and will eventually continue to explore other neighborhoods
across the city in this same manner. It is street performance
ethnography in a way, where whatever is happening on the
street that day is captured through the visual documentation of
the film, and also whoever is present in the space and wants to
engage and talk about their neighborhood and their experiences
of performance can do so. Moving from this micro point to
the macro, I’m viewing the city as it’s constructed and built
up from these very tiny little slices and pieces. I believe the
post-bankruptcy gentrification process (whatever that means
– it varies tremendously by neighborhood and by classification
tensions of those implicated) can be explained and a story of
Detroit is told through this framework of the theater.
So, that’s how the ethnographic gaze comes into play. Another
element is notions of surveillance and appropriation. People
have talked about the public space a lot recently. [David
J.] Madden is one person who has written on it — this idea
of surveillance as ending the ‘myth of the public space’ and
how urban space is contested through this ongoing daily
struggle. 6 So, what I’m doing is I’m marrying different
strands of theory into this intellectual underpinning, but
it also becomes this crazy art project on the street, where I
don’t know what’s going to happen from event to event!
Biba: Yes! The flux is crucial, often articulating the particulars
or performative epiphanies of the work. Can you talk about a
moment that stands out — when you were surprised by how a
performance, interview, or experience transpired? Or, maybe,
how indeterminacy participates in the methodology of the project?
Maya: A moment that stood out for me happened last year at
the Gratiot and Chene store. As we were dancing and filming,
a man who is known to be in front of that particular store all
day was yelling out, “That’s modern dance!” “They’re doing
modern dance, y’all.” He proceeded to verbally interact with the
performance, punctuating our movements with his comments
and exclamations. Finally, he came over to the performance
area while we were dancing on camera, and joined in with our
movements. His improvised movements incorporated the
structure of our choreography, if not the technique. In the film he
looks quite serious at this point, as if he’s sincerely improvising
with us toward a goal. His joking ceased when he joined us on
camera. It was an interesting moment that made me think
about post-proscenium performance and its particularities and
/On Dance
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opportunities. Also about post-institutional or post-armchair
ethnography and what it means to engage honestly and directly
with people and places you’re researching.
Biba: Is the choreographic material that you’re working with
and placing consistent? Is it set? It also appears nomadic,
in that you’re moving around to these different sites and
you are escaping or exiting the more expected venues and
situations for dance. I have the image of people hanging out
in the parking lot, music blasting, spontaneous dancing,
frolicking, and having fun. You are marrying this scene with
a more stylized, choreographed, and rehearsed aesthetic.
While performing your faces are unaffected; you are in it.
statement of care for the neighborhood. A statement that this
space matters at this time. Not after real estate speculation, slick
PR, or quasi-private grant funding, but right now. It matters.
This is beyond the ethnographic and/or anthropological but I
suppose it is connected with my approach to carnal sociology/
anthropology foregrounded by Wacquant. There is already some
sort of party happening at many of the stores (not always). I work
to participate in an authentic way. Everything that is happening
at the stores is not joyous. Everything is not melancholy. So the
dance performances are this neutral piece of art that can be
taken and consumed by the people present however they wish.
Then the people can respond with their thoughts and comments
in the interviews.
Maya: I wanted to bring a particular concert dance aesthetic
(acknowledging the complexities of what that even means!) to
this very post-concert dance art project. There are some deep,
personal reasons for this. In the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood
where I’ve lived and worked for three years while starting LST,
the problems of poverty and abandonment and disinvestment
are so blatant that they smack you and assault your eyes nearly
everywhere you look. At the same time, the neighborhood is full of
rich culture and cultural traditions, individuals with fascinating
lives and histories and memories, and places and spaces with
beauty, memory, present utility, potential, and possibilities.
In talking to people about the neighborhood, some people have
expressed what they think is a loss of hope experienced by some
residents due to the assault that crack of the 1980s and 1990s
and industrial departures, job losses, neo-liberal policies and
mass incarceration dovetailing at the same time, pressed upon
the neighborhood. Because many residents left during these
hard times, and the city infrastructure has been neglected, jobs
have disappeared, the area has been devastated in many ways.
Part of what LST does, is make a statement with this obsessively
precise choreography and our filming and the care and time
and attention to detail, and this is that I wanted to make a
Biba: Can you tell me about the different places you’ve been
and how it works, exactly? How is a performance installed and
what kind of strategy is this for you as it relates to the precarity
of the environment, which, outside and on the street, is literally
out in the open? I’m thinking that it may feel vulnerable, as a
woman. How do interactions with the public, the audience, and
your neighbors generally occur? Then also, from a dancerly
background and context, what precipitated this project? Was
there a movement or trajectory you had in terms of performing in
public spaces that then brought you to the site in front of the liquor
store, the liquor store as backdrop, the liquor store as center, as
a kind of center or square or meeting place, and its parking lot?
Maya: I think dance inherently, dance in a broad sense —
encompassing everything from exploration of space to codified
dance technique — I think everything in the continuum, dance
is a political act, a mobilization of a particular body for a purpose.
Dance is inherently a political act. Over my years of studying
and working with and learning from different people (Ariel
Osterweis was and continues to be a major influence on me) the
fusion of dance as a political act with exploration of challenging/
contesting the body politic, contesting place and space through
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
the body, and all of this came together in an obsession with
putting performance and dance in public spaces to see what
happens…To bring together the world of the private and the
world of the public. As I did more and more dance in urban public
spaces it fused with my interests in ideas of the rights to the city,
ideas of fields of power, ideas of the whole story of a neighborhood,
or the story of the city, and the ideas of the theater as the way
of understanding quotidian life. I realized that this is the way
I will study and write about gentrification in Detroit – through
dance/performance/ethnography/choreography. All of this
came together. And I think the choreography part is important.
Biba: Yes, I think the political dimension of choreography is so
important and urgently relevant to the contemporary. You are
discussing a trajectory from the choreographies of the stage, of
dance’s proper spaces (as a disciplinary terrain), to the social —
social movements, distributions in space, and the agency of the
body. Can you discuss your own personal, artistic trajectory that
connects these dots? Was there an Aha!! moment? Have there
been moments like this for you in the midst of LST?
resources in neighborhoods, but to shine a light on what is going
on, the creativity and ingenuity of people, the DIY aesthetic that
originates from urban ghettos, to think about this critically.
When the term DIY or reclaimed is used, people may not think
of the urban ghetto. They may think of areas in the city that
are much further along in Detroit’s recovery process. However,
this just isn’t true. DIY comes from the hood in this town.
The term “creative place-making” is so hot now that it needs
no footnote, and it’s so well known that it is no longer even hot.
However, the who of who gets to be inscribed as doing creative
place-making is determined almost exclusively by classification
tensions such as wealth, ethnicity/race, and gender. Are the
people in the neighborhood who have no place else to go, nothing
else to do (remembering high unemployment in Detroit generally
and in impoverished neighborhoods in particular), not engaging
in creative place-making by creating their own quotidian theater
on the street? I believe they are.
And then, this blend of work and leisure 7 that is at the liquor
store struck me.
/On Dance
Maya: That is a challenge, because there have been many Aha!
moments and there continue to be Aha! moments up to the
present during this project! Let’s see. Biking down Gratiot one
day a few years ago I was observing all of the space devoted to
liquor stores and wondering what this means. McDougall-Hunt
doesn’t have any city-maintained public spaces where people
can gather. The neighborhood also does not have shopping that
would be considered mainstream, quality shopping by American
middle-class standards. And yet, in this quasi public/private
space, people have done this DIY work of making the spaces their
own. For instance, in some spaces, vendors offer items that are
desired by residents and not offered in stores (incense, African
American centered literature, non-processed foods, are some
examples). In other spaces, music is played from cars to create an
atmosphere of pleasure/leisure. This is not to glamorize lack of
One thing that I’ve had issues with is the role of the ethnographer
as someone who is coming and taking, coming and extracting
information from people, often taking from people who are
historically marginalized, and coming and taking information
from them and leaving. So LST is a performance ethnography
(although that can be problematized in a lot of ways and there
is definitely a lining of privilege in going and dancing in
films in Detroit neighborhoods), but with LST I want to bring
something to people rather than simply taking. That is why
“carnal anthropology” (after Wacquant) makes sense to me
practically and theoretically. In that I am asking them about
their lives, asking them to be vulnerable and share their ideas
and their experiences and I want to be vulnerable with them too.
LST is a container for that.
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People have thought to re-center LST as a dance activism
project, which, really it’s not. That is, the project is not dance
activism in a sense of bringing a prepared message and trying
to spread it through movement. LST is not trying to spread a
message. It’s exploratory, it’s theoretical and it’s also in the
realm of telling the story of the city’s gentrification process
through ethnography. But I do acknowledge that because I
am a fourth generation Detroiter of African descent there’s
something inherently political that the project encourages
and there’s something that happened there. LST is asking big
questions and it’s attempting to deploy the theater and deploy
performance in a way that’s almost like a cognitive prompt.
Biba: What do you mean by performance as “a cognitive
prompt”? You mentioned it in terms of the audience, in terms
of giving a point of reference or something to look at, something
to participate in. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Maya: In the first round of LST events, which happened in
the summer of 2014, I was asking a lot of questions about the
neighborhood and the city. I thought, I want to know more
about the city and the neighborhood but really more about
people’s performances of their everyday lives, and use that as a
framework to tell a story of a neighborhood and the story of a city
— from the micro-experiences that people share and the macrostructural
forces. So, every performance is choreographed, to
a certain degree. Even if it’s deliberately not choreographed,
then that’s choreographed, and every ethnographic encounter
is choreographed (always for anthropologists in the field, to
varying degrees). So, working in this seam of performance of
ethnography in urban commons, it’s playing with this idea of
the choreographed ethnic encounter and the choreographed
performance. It’s playing in this seam/scene and attempting,
through methodological technique, to deepen the experience,
deepen the connection between the performers, the researcher,
and the participants through this temporality of places and
bodies that’s being navigated with the choreography as tool.
Biba: Can you say a little bit more about the
choreography both of the dance and the ethnographic
encounter? What is it? What does it look like?
Maya: Yes. For the first year of the project a lot of the
choreography has emerged from field notes, observations of
my neighborhood. I live in this little disremembered, physically
distressed neighborhood that’s about two miles east of downtown
Detroit and worlds away economically. This neighborhood has
been referred to by residents as little Beirut, little Afghanistan.
It’s an incredibly distressed neighborhood and based on my
experiences being out in the neighborhood, whether having a
dance rehearsal in our parking lot or gardening in the garden
across from our studio, the experience of inhabiting a space
which feels physically and intellectually safe. But, you’ve read
the crime rates, you’ve read the statistics, you’ve seen the
news articles about your neighborhood and you’ve heard your
neighborhood is the second most dangerous neighborhood in
America and yet you’re dancing and gardening in it! So, a lot of the
movement comes from this scene of paradoxes of the experiences
of living here. I would say about 70 percent of our neighbors are
people who could be seen as transient individuals or people who
are in this very fringe definition as far as classification in the
economic realm would go. These are the people who presumably
have watched out for us and have been in the area and have helped
us garden and have helped us maintain a peaceful existence.
Biba: They have been neighborly.
Maya: Yes, exactly. They’ve been neighborly. So, the
choreography definitely taps into this set of experiences
and the experience of living here.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Biba: And what is a choreography for an ethnographic
encounter like? What is the structure for that? Is it theoretical?
Is it physical? Are there certain questions or proposals?
Maya: I think the way it upholds practically is the choreography
itself, which then we can call a performance as it’s embodied
by the dancers. It acts as a cognitive prompt. There’s this odd
impact that it has where people, after they stop watching the
dance and they go in and buy their items from the store or they
finish having their conversation and they come back and we’ve
finished a series of two- or three-minute performances, we ask
them “can we interview you?” People are like “Oh, ok. What’re
you doing, some kind of art project?” and they’re open, suddenly,
because they’ve seen us perform, they’ve watched us, they’ve
been observing us. So, when we come out and ask them there’s
this totally different feel.
For instance, we’ve experimented and came to a store and tried
to get b-roll, 8 and I was like, “Let me just see if people will talk
to me before they’ve seen us dance.” The reaction is striking.
The responses are “Oh, are you a journalist?” or “My cousin
works for the city, I have no comment.” But when the role of
performance is introduced, it’s like they’re participating in a
dialogue almost, as opposed to being put on the spot. I guess
I’m lucky because the project…it just works. And it wasn’t like
it set out with “Oh, people won’t talk to me unless I dance.”
It was just, “We’re going to go and dance because we want to
experience and convene with this environment in an organic
way, this little space, and talk to people.” It just so happens that
somehow the performance or the choreography becomes this
way to have this dialogue with people in a very different way.
Biba: Absolutely. You talked a little bit about the politics and
relationship to this mode of dance activism, and I think about
the politics of movement in a space. I still want to go back to this
question of what is a typical Liquor Store performance from the
beginning, just didactically. But I also want address this question
of movement and its taking place, which has everything to do
with the identity of the body and the politics of occupying these
spaces. I’m thinking now of the pre-assigned conditions for
movement in and in front of the liquor store, in the parking lot,
and out onto the sidewalk and street — the spaces you are dancing
in. You’re occupying this outdoor space, you’re on the sidewalk,
you’re in the parking lot, you’re on the street corner and I think
about it in a couple different ways. These actions — these modes
of dancing on the street — entail a bevy of contingencies and
shifts depending on the body who does it, its locale, the people
surrounding, the time of day, and the choreographic quality of
the actions, what it means to get from point A to point B.
These are transient spaces, in a sense. They are the places we pass
through, drive passed; we’re in and out. And then there is the
surveillance and policing of these spaces, and the impact of those
actions/actors that choose not to pass through, but dwell, linger,
or dance for an extended period of time. They test the importance
of passing through, and highlight the ways that spaces determine
which movements can take place — we are reminded of the
prominence of social utterances like “no loitering,” “no hanging
around,” “no gathering” — and here enters the question of
policing. André Lepecki theorizes choreopolicing through
Jacques Rancière’s writing on dissensus. For him, choreography
begins to lack imagination, it becomes impoverished, “a policed
dance of quotidian consensus.” Politics, on the other hand,
become visible through resistance to simply “moving along,” and
transforming and reclaiming these spaces, thus allowing for the
appearance of a newly political subject. 9 Your dancerly actions
promote the liquor store in its identification as a commons or
meeting place and the question of the civic comes up. We’re
really in this moment now of engaging this issue specifically,
again facing the police violence directed toward people of color,
males on the street, and what it means to be occupying that space.
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Then on the flipside, there’s this beautiful text by bell hooks,
Belonging: A Culture of Place, where she discusses the porch and
its relationship to the home, but also its presence and proximity
to the street. 10 The porch offers an architectural transposition
of zones between the street and the home and she discusses
how the everyday gesture of sitting on the porch acts against
the institutionalized racism in the public arena. The street is a
risky zone, fraught with exposure and vulnerability, especially
for female bodies. She writes about what it means to be placing
oneself on the urban street, on the street corner, a “patriarchal
territory,” and the ethos of this territory which is about being
looked at, observed, and making oneself available for a range of
possible propositions to be negotiated or endured. Again, there is
the imperative of “move along, no loitering,” a similar scenario
but from a different point of view.
For dance the challenge is to shift these conditions from
that choreographic scene as a kind of social habitus, to shift
the movements that reproduce these conditions, to counter
or critique or reinvent the repertory of pre-determined
movements. I’m especially interested in the possibility of
dance to be a way to shift and derail it a little. You’re there,
you’re standing there, you’re staying there, how much time do
you spend there? Enough time so that these encounters can
start to accumulate, so that they can happen multiple times.
They can repeat; participate in a performative chain of events.
This possibility of occupying space, mobilizing space, dancing
throughout — I’m coming at it from three different angles, but
dance, whether the discrete performances in front of the liquor
store or its potential as a mode of activism within a broader
sense, becomes an agent by which to work through these issues.
hooks presents with respect to the porch oscillates within
LST. The porch is a public/private space that allows reversal
and contestation of notions of surveillance. LST happens
in spaces (city street sidewalks) that are totally different
from porches but also somehow related – these in-between
spaces on the margins where unique contestations may occur.
So, dealing with this idea of space and the meaning of space and
how space is worked on in this project, what I’m doing in a sense…
Wacquant has a theory called territorial stigma. It’s really a
theory that combines [Erving] Goffman’s theory of stigma and
the idea of a spoiled identity with Bourdieu’s idea of classification
struggle in the fields of power. 11 So, territorial stigma from
Wacquant is this machining of stigmatization, marginalization,
toxification, taint of a particular neighborhood. And it’s a theory
that’s not limited to urban contexts; it’s not bounded by ideas
based on the social and political construct of race as a binary.
It’s really these ideas of pathologization of difference, and
inscription of symbolic power or symbolic meaninglessness of
certain spaces. And so, this project is studying the impacts of
both gentrification and territorial stigma. I started this project
in my neighborhood where I live and work. This neighborhood
that has been rendered invisible by city practices. There are
decaying structures, debris from all kinds of different forgotten
buildings, schools, businesses. This area definitely is subject to
the idea of spatial taint that Wacquant proposes. This area is
under the patriarchal gaze that bell hooks proposes in that it is
considered a crime-infested area to be surveilled and perhaps, at
some point, invested in through speculative real estate markets.
I see the ideas of hooks and Wacquant converging in these ideas
of territory.
Maya: The writer and scholar, bell hooks’, writing is
important to my work as well. I’m glad you mentioned her text,
Belonging: A Culture of Place. The liminality of spaces that
LST is directly contesting the taint that I see as being imposed
upon this neighborhood. So with LST I unfold the visual
anthropology of particular neighborhoods and ultimately tell
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
a broad visual anthropology of Detroit in its post-bankruptcy
neo-liberal gentrification process… where you walk two miles
from Dan Gilbert’s urban distressed font of "Opportunity
Detroit" adorning all of these buildings purchased at rockbottom
prices (pun acknowledged). We have this neighborhood
that’s largely forgotten by city officials, foundations, and
corporations, but, yet, there is a neighborhood, there are
people here. It exists. It’s contesting this territorial stigma by
its very existence and LST has very deliberately captured this.
This summer [2015] LST has continued in Midtown. 12 Midtown
is a neighborhood where the right to the city is very much
being contested between working-class and poor people and
speculative real estate investors at present moment. There’s
more capital investment that’s happening which is forcing some
residents in rent-controlled buildings out of their areas. There’s
relatively more investment from capitalist-type enterprises
happening so looking at territorial stigma in its mirror
image, which I argue is this idea of symbolic ownership being
asserted through a false narrative of whiteness, showing both
flipsides of this through the project, or investigating both sides.
Biba: I’m very curious how the experience will shift, who
you’ll encounter, the modes of address…
Maya: Mack & Bewick (shot in May 2015) was the first video of
the summer of this year of the project and it happened at the
liquor store that is a really interesting theater, it’s already a
theater in its own right. You go by there and you’ll see vendors,
people gathering sitting on crates, holding court, everyday once
the weather gets decent.
Biba: This is a good moment to tell me what that entails. What
is a day in the life while you’re doing a shoot? How does it work?
What is the general time frame and the course of events?
Maya: We meet up at my studio space [Finite Studios]. This
includes the videographer Eric Johnston and his wife Martha
Johnston who is also a painter and photographer, the dancers
who are participating, and my husband Todd [“Quaint”] Stovall.
He is a sculptor and an electronic music producer and makes
much of the music for the LST. We get to the day’s store in the
early afternoon and we, the dancers along with the videographer,
pick out where the best shot will be with the ability for people
milling around to observe but without obstructing anybody’s
walkway. We start marking; we start exploring the space. It has
some kind of a ceremonial feel, when we start to do this, and
then we start to talk to people and answer people’s questions.
The general feeling when the camera appears, before we’re
dancing, seems to be one of ambivalence. People are concerned
about surveillance and about intentions. Somehow, when we
start dancing, this shifts (at least in degree). People seem to
be more comfortable that we are subjecting ourselves to their
surveillance. Although we’ve brought a big camera with a big
lens, we’re fixing that camera on ourselves before we attempt
to turn it around. I think this is important. The ceremonial feel
I mention (definitely ceremonial with a little “c,” not evoking
religion or ritual in the literal sense) involves a blessing (again
not in a religious sense but in a spiritual or ontological sense) of
the space in a way that says, we’re here to do something (dance)
because this space matters (because you’re already here).
So back to the logistics of the thing. Our videographer is
capturing our performance, and then, you know, people are
generally gathering and observing and wondering what’s going on.
Biba: How long does the dance performance generally last?
Maya: The longest single piece that I’ve set at a LST event is
about seven minutes. Typically we do at least four stagings
of a full piece or pieces depending upon the repertoire being
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presented that day. In total I’d say we end up performing for
about 30-40 minutes, as far as performing with music through
the PA, with the videographer shooting. We’ll repeat. We’ll
do several shots — he might shoot us over the shoulder, etc.
The goal of this is to get as many people to see us as we can, so
that we can have a dialogue with those individuals who may
be interested in talking with us. The way that it will work is,
say, we’re doing a three minute piece and then we’ve got people
standing around, then people say, “What’re you doing?” and
we say, “Oh we’re doing a dance project in Detroit. Would you
talk to us?” At that point we shift the gaze the videographer is
filming while I’m off camera interviewing individuals. That’s
the format. Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes we’ve had
in the past a line of people who want to be interviewed and
then at other times just one person will come and then other
people will decline. There’s no set format that it takes… it’s
based on the store and how the shoot unfolds, and everything,
but overall the choreography is effective at starting a dialogue.
Biba: What types of questions do you ask? What stories are
you looking for?
Maya: I ask about the neighborhoods, the city, and people’s
experience of performance. I have my list of questions but it
really varies what we discuss based on the particular person and
what their goals and ideas are with respect to the conversation.
The conversations I’ve had in McDougall-Hunt and Midtown
seem to be on different points of a time-space continuum.
In McDougall-Hunt, many people talk about the future and
potential changes. In Midtown, many people talk about the
imprint of gentrification and how it is consolidating, replicating,
and expanding structural racism and structural violence. I try
to talk with people about performance in the quotidian sense
and in the abstract sense. I’m looking to have conversations with
people about what they want to talk about. That sounds obvious,
but it is about listening and letting the conversation happen.
Biba: There is one video — I think it’s the one at Gratiot and
Chene — where a man that you’ve spoken with begins to dance
with you. It’s an incredible moment to watch. Perhaps this is the
man who you mentioned earlier. This moment was very singular
in the LST footage I’ve seen. He is a bit in the background,
standing close to the doorframe of the store entrance and it looks
as if he moves through a range reactions, watching, incredulous,
interested, inspired, and then, all at once, he becomes one of
the dancers, moving with and alongside your performance,
gleefully. Perhaps this is the man you mentioned earlier, shouting
about modern dance. I didn’t see it happen during other video
documentation — this kind of participation. It really shifted
things. Does this happen with frequency? How do you think
about these improvised moments?
Maya: That actually happens quite a bit, and it’s something that,
for the first year Eric and I, we were not so attuned to capturing
those moments on film. We had this idea that those were personal
moments of interaction between the dancers and the people
onsite, and that we didn’t need to lift up those moments because
they were special moments that happened behind the scenes.
But then, this year, digesting all that happened in the first year
of the project I’m like, “Wait a minute. We have to capture and
share these moments…” This is so important, this is at the center
of the project visually as well. Of course, we asked people, “Hey
is it okay if we include this part where you started free-styling
or you know mimicking the dancers movements?” And those
requirements of doing research, even when it is this crazy art
project. So, yes, that happens more than is visible in the first
five films and it’s something that we look forward to showing
as it happens. It’s interesting on so many levels — through a
theoretical lens, performance, site of urban commons as a
negotiation and a becoming and a state of the city in flux. It’s
just important on so many levels and bears more investigation.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Biba: It blurs your roles even more and your working
methodologies, maybe less your role as a figure but the kind
of methodologies that you’re using and activating. I think
about that transition for you between performing and… I’ve
just performed, I turn around and I start asking questions
and interviewing… that shift, that transition, that moment
is so strange. It’s weird enough just finishing a performance
and then facing the audience and being like “Hey, nice to
see you.” That shift of focus in the midst of being together.
But it really is different senses of being together, through
interactions and the level of participation in the dancing itself.
Biba: It seems to me also that you’re challenging the centrality
of consumption as a necessary response. Of course, performance
is consumed and that element is always there, but also that
in those shifts and moments of consumption, that mode of
engagement might in a sense recede. There is a participatory
element—people are joining in, in some ways. It’s interesting
because you’re surprising people, there’s a guerrilla element to it.
I wonder how discomfort or awkwardness also complicates the
way we are discussing consumption, for there may also be the
desire to look the other way. I didn’t see that in the videos, but I’m
thinking back on Moten and Piper as well as my own experience.
Maya: One thing too is ideas of consumption and who gets to
consume dance. When you look for instance at hip hop studies
and why hip hop studies is suddenly considered this exciting
site for all kinds of pedagogical and scholarly interventions,
when you look at it it’s hard, I mean, hip hop is a consumption
and commodification of blackness and black bodies and for the
most part, the remuneration is spread amongst an elite group
of record executives and owners of related concerns. We wonder
why black studies, referring to the project that emerged in the
sixties through civil rights movements, isn’t held up as this site of
intervention in pedagogical and scholarly realms and why black
studies being sort of usurped by hip hop studies. I think it gets
back to this idea of consumption and consumption of elements
of black culture that are being appropriated by the mainstream
and used for their own devices and then homogenized as this sort
of colorblind multicultural thing that really is ahistorical and
apolitical and a-critical. Part of the goal of the project is: “Who
gets to consume dance” and “Who gets to consume this material?”
It’s re-appropriating, and it’s this challenging of who should be
consuming contemporary or experimental performances. We’re
putting these performances on the street for whoever’s there in
whatever neighborhood to consume them, to challenge these
modes of consumption that privilege upper class, economic elite.
The question of consumption brings us back to our earlier
discussion of the gaze and resistance, where the gaze necessarily
entails a scene of consumption. In many ways it gets to the
very heart of the dancer’s political challenge as it relates to the
collapsing of these categories of subject and object, blurring and
destabilizing their positions and famously articulated by William
Butler Yeats: “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”
Maya: Yeah, that is interesting. I think that’s part of the state
of flux in a city that Andrew D. Newman, my advisor at Wayne
State University, writes about in Landscape of Discontent. It’s
the state of becoming, this ongoing state of transition, and I think
that is part of it. It’s part of why this project is a window to tell
a broader story of Detroit neighborhoods and the city. I think,
yeah, people will look the other way and people will be disturbed
or uninterested in it and that’s fine too. It’s a process of flux,
and that happens with anything that’s happening on the street.
Biba: And how has LST, how has going out into the city
in this capacity — performing, interacting, talking,
interviewing, having these exchanges — how has it changed
your relationship to dance? Has it affected your dancing?
/On Dance
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Maya: Wow, yeah, I think in a way it’s work at a de-centering
of “performer” as this heroic individual or this Artist with a
big, privileged capital “A” and a re-centering of it insofar as in
its context. It has made the meaning and the temporality, the
frailty of the moment, the precarity, so much more important
than the particular performer. The conceptualist and performer
Ralph Lemon, whose work I adore and obsess about, has said that
where dance is landing now is the exploration of space, and so
LST is like mating Ralph Lemon and Wacquant and taking this
exploration of space through a dance/performance lens. It really
doesn’t matter, so much, what the dancers do as long it’s from a
place of genuine interaction and conversation with the audience.
I say that, although I do put tremendous care and preparation
into the performances that we present at LST events. I’m guilty:
I love technique, I love ballet, I love contemporary, I love modern,
codified techniques, but I also think that this place where dance
can land is so much more broad and powerful and experimental
than the assertion of the importance of a particular artist with
a capital “A” or even any particular dance technique. What can I
do to explore this, this place that we’re in from an existential lens
and from a critical lens and all of these different ways? I think it
changed my… well not changed, I come from a critical perspective,
so I haven’t had a diametrical shift, but I’ve had a very concrete,
on-the-ground experience of using a particular art form as
a way to explore deep existential, theoretical phenomenon.
Biba: When you talk about the fragility and the precarity of that
moment of it unfolding… that is so real. And then I also think so
much about dance, the act of dancing as it takes place, lands in
a place…how were you articulating it? Landing in a place, yea
Maya: Yeah. Ralph Lemon was talking about “Where can dance
land?” and “Where can it land for you?” and “Where can it land
as an art form?” From a big perspective and where can it land
for you. So, answering Ralph Lemon’s question, LST is currently
where it lands for me. This theme of exploring the very existential
philosophical but still sociologically — and anthropologically
— based question of how is performance deployed in a struggle
for the right to the city. How is dance deployed in classification
struggles, identification tensions, and urban marginality? And
how is performance deployed in post-bankruptcy, gentrifying
Detroit? The story of the city will unfold through this lens, I believe.
Biba: Yes, where it lands. You say it doesn’t really matter what
the dancers actually do and somehow this sentiment strikes
me as so radical. For, of course, the dancers are spinning
the moment of the event, honing the focus and creating
the interactive, relational openings for conversation and
exchange. Yet, at the same time your statement is not about
foreclosure but of redirecting the frame, opening it up, to
include the larger scene or field. We move from a dance to
dance (capital “D” without capitalizing “d”), which can then
be redistributed within the frame of the choreographic and
produce an important political movement. This is the work
that I’m interested in, as a dancer, as an advocate for dance.
I’m so curious about that moment, when “It really doesn’t even
matter, so much, what the dancers do,” because it opens up to
the where of the dance taking place, and the where is both what
it produces and inflects. This is what is happening. I think
that the political potential of dancing and, thus, choreography
is very much about this opening up of the where, the actual
site it occupies but, also, how this action of landing opens
up the where. Especially in light of Detroit, in light of these
questions of the city, an internally unstable signifier, the
where inspires a question that both mobilizes (as in it makes
it dance) and can itself be mobilized (redistributing spatial
politics). The peripheral threshold of the liquor store, tainted
but rich, circumspect but necessary, engages this question of
mobility. It seems to me that this is what your theater, LST, is
asking us to consider, look at, and participate in. ■
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
5 Anthropologist, choreographer, dancer, and humanitarian Katherine
1 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of a Black Radical Tradition
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 235.
2 In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu presents the concept of symbolic power,
Dunham’s early form of practice theory/carnal anthropology in Haiti
included Dunham’s approach of dancing, living, and working intensely
with her research participants and even being initiated into the cult
of Haitian Vodun. Cf. Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969).
arguing that symbolic power “make[s] people see and believe which is
given by the imposition of mental structures. Systems of classification
would not be such a decisive object of struggle if they did not contribute
to the existence of classes by enhancing the efficacy of the objective
mechanisms with the reinforcement supplied by representations
structured in accordance with the classification.” Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 482. Here, the importance of
the connection between fields of power and classification struggles are
underlined. In LST, classification struggles are studied on-the-ground
through performance and dance ethnography in which the observation
of classification tensions (i.e. race/ethnicity, economic status, ability,
gender, etc.) is married to an observation of the significance of place
and space in a private/public arena.
3 The right to the city is a theory of urban social space asserted by
French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre first in 1968. In
Lefebvre’s text, Le Droit à la ville, the right to the city is described as
the demand for continued and transforming access to city life and
city life’s various amenities. Anthropologist and geographer David
Harvey expanded Lefebvre’s definition to incorporate the notion of
human rights as central to the right to the city. Cf.. David Harvey,
Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2003).
This is applicable in the post-bankruptcy Detroit context, in which
gentrification is happening alongside large-scale residential water
shut-offs, for instance.
4 Urban sociologist and social theorist Loïc Wacquant established the
6 In "Revisiting the End of Public Space: Assembling the Public in an
Urban Park," sociologist David J. Madden writes that “compared
to the august monuments, bucolic pleasure domes, and utilitarian
playgrounds of previous eras, public spaces in advanced capitalist
cities have become increasingly complex: more intensely surveilled;
more meticulously managed; more explicitly experiential, cosmopolitan,
commercial, and commodified." David J. Madden, "Revisiting the
End of Public Space: Assembling the Public In an Urban Park," City
and Community, 9.2 (2010): 187. Such factors Madden highlights
have contributed to the idea of public space as a category being
threatened and/or eradicated at the turn of the twenty-first century.
These challenges to public space strengthen the significance of the
theory of the right to the city argued by Lefebvre and Harvey. LST
emerges as a post-public space project in which city dwellers create
their own commons due to broad disinvestment in neighborhoods
deemed pathological.
7 Henri Lefebvre wrote of the relationship between work and leisure
in his analysis of the production of space in urban environments. Cf.
Henri Lefevbre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968).
8 B-roll refers to footage of the neighborhood and the store itself,
capturing the scene and the atmosphere.
9 André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the
dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review, 57.4 (Winter 2013): 13-27.
10 bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009).
/On Dance
terms, carnal sociology, and sociology of flesh and blood, to refer to an
engaged, embodied form of research in which researchers live, work,
and practice alongside their research participants. Cf. Loïc Wacquant,
"Hominis in extremis: What fighting Scholars teach us about Habitus,"
Body and Society, 20.2 (2014): 3-17, and "For a Sociology of Flesh and
Blood," Qualitative Sociology, 38.1 (2015): 1-11. This form of research
and analysis is also broadly referred to as practice theory, formally
introduced by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1977 text, Outline of a Theory of
Practice (Cambridge: CUP, 1977). In studying urban Chicago at the
end of the twentieth century, Wacquant joined a Southside Chicago
boxing gym and became an amateur prizefighter during his research
on urban pugilists. LST builds on and extends the possibilities of
practice theory/carnal sociology by adding a choreo-ethnographic
dimension, creating/illuminating a theater of the street, and reversing/
challenging the ethnographic gaze.
11 Wacquant’s territorial stigma theory argues that certain places and
spaces become read as pathological and are therefore disremembered
and disinvested by city officials and residents alike (this happens
through neo-liberal policies and through the actions of people in daily
life). Territorial stigma is formulated through French philosopher and
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power (cf. Bourdieu,
Distinction) as the location of class struggle, and sociologist Erving
Goffman’s theory of stigma as spoiled identity. Cf. Erving Goffman,
"Behavior in Public Spaces," Notes on the Social Organization of
Gatherings (New York: The Free Press, 1963).
12 Some people would argue that in Detroit, the name "Midtown" is a
corporatized term that is used to refer to the Cass Corridor and a
constellation of other, smaller neighborhoods which orbit the Cass
Corridor. For simplicity, LST uses the term Midtown, but acknowledges
the problematics of the term and the complexities of the neighborhoods
that the term incorporates.
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Ten Statements
on Art and Culture
/Mårten Spångberg
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
01
Art is not culture nor is culture art
Somebody tells me the piece is consumerist, over-consumption,
smartphone, logo-fest, beautiful skinny people, selfie,
pop-overkill and that’s just the beginning…
Shit, this probably means that the work is or appears benevolent
to contemporary capitalism or neo-liberalism [NL] in general.
Goddamn, what did I do wrong? So wrong. Fine enough and I ask
myself [oh, yes I was around in the 90’s so I still use critique],
what makes, or what are the properties needed for a work of art
in 2014 to be none of the above or simpler, something that is not
correlated to NL? Check it out, me and a few million other artists
and etc. have asked that question for decades and does it look
like any of us or them came up with a solution? I don’t think so.
I don’t think so even a lil bit. If one or a few of us had, wouldn’t
it be, like, wise to say something or at least make a career from
it on the art market. Oh blast, the solution to non-NL correlated
works of art must be that they are kept very very secret, cuz when
they enter the art market, which we know absorbs everything
with value, they will obviously be available both on webpages of
NL correlated galleries, on smartphones and the artist will pose
for Scene & Herd next to Anton Vidokle or why not Raymundas
Malasauskas or Hans Ulrich Obrist (obviously all men).
/On Dance
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02
Art is not synonymous with culture
but is always taking place against a
cultural background.
Or, when last did you lay eyes, experience, feel, listen to or even
hear rumors about an art that wasn’t standing knee deep in that
poop called capitalism? Exactly, you didn’t. Because, if you did
you’d probably fly away or something, vanish. Our problem today
is not whether or not we are inscribed in capitalism, but that the
enemy and the sponsor of the emancipation is one and the same.
It’s not that we have a choice right, we don’t live in capitalism,
life itself is capitalism and it’s not like we can call in sick.
Whilst those petty dread-locks-equipped-political-theory-postgrads-at-New-School
were screaming and organizing themselves
in any lateral sort of way, wow – Wall Street could do even dirtier
business (no one was looking their direction…), harvest ideas
from the activist below and it goes without saying that the suits
had the time of their life – how rad isn’t it to host a bunch of
anti-capitalist in your backyard. That’s like a female without
a bra in Mad Men.
Or turn it around. Who was most happy about, and who gained
most from Occupy Wall Street (remember that movement, aha
Zizek said something right…)? The answer is obvious, yep – Wall
Street loved it. They sanctioned it, celebrated it, subsidized
it and even licked it. Wall Street knew that business won’t be
interrupted. Hello, the wheels of capitalism are not about to
stop turning because of some noise in a park. Nothing in fact
can make those wheels stop, and I mean it.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
03
Culture however is not art. A culture
equals its circulation of value,
whereas to art circulated value is
supplementary.
Disclaimer. As we all know anti- is as in as the pro, the obedient,
benevolent or opportunistic. There’s no such thing as a subversive,
critical you name it that’s not soaked in political economy, or
as Wittgenstein had it, it is first with the elaboration of an
altogether different grammar that something can transform in
a non-reactive manner. See what I mean, change is not enough
what is needed is to change how change changes.
Admiration. It’s kind of cute to experience artists that suddenly
need to make a piece about or addressing some injustice,
that support some cause, that take ecology seriously or in a
collaboration with an architect provide some new form of
shelter for the homeless or something involving children.
In all it’s care and sweetness doesn’t it look a little silly to
just because some inflight magazine featured a devastating
spread about something really really incredibly cruel
and bad USA that you, the artist, are reaching out. “I
have kids you know, and I want them to…” – Seriously.
It’s too late, there’s no we shall overcome when you at the same
time enjoy seven hundred thousand euro subsidies from the
Belgian state, and it’s after all you that is making something
about, exactly about that nobody should be poisoned, hungry,
violated, pollution and global warming, nothing will or can
change because you are fiddling around in your studio for
another three months and do a showing for your peers. Nobody
is happier than you when you cancel an engagement in Israel at
the last moment, but isn’t it just a little bit too easy to support
the Palestinians from your studio in Neuköln or when having
drinks with the NY downtown scene. If you wanna be engaged
what’s the price you’re willing to pay for engaging? Precisely,
you’re not willing to pay any price at all, because as we all know
you cancelled Tel Aviv in order to boost your creds vis the art
council, some festival director – to announce it on your webpage.
Yep, you are approximately as hot as Sinead O’Conner bashing
Miley for being a sell-out and a victim. How naïve can you be?
“-Oh, but she said my video…” Sure, but did that make an open
letter promoted all over the place the appropriate approach? You
know if you wanna be engaged you can stop making art, art will
not miss you. If you wanna be engaged that’s all super but perhaps
you should rethink that you are showing documentation of your
dirty work in that upcoming biennale, that you are making bags
of money when selling or touring the schtuff. I’m not saying you
should stop or start anything, but you know our polluted earth
doesn’t need another performance, installation, intervention or
even a small ass painting. Nobody starving, lacking medication,
or working in sweatshops will ever notice or gain access to your
work, but if you inform them about it, it’s quite likely that they
find it pretentious of you to tell them about the importance of
democracy or whatever you think is good for them.
/On Dance
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04
Culture is the condition necessary for art. Any
culture. No culture is more or less suitable for
art, but different cultures provoke different forms
or expressions of art.
Ecology, global warming, injustice, children, any concern
is a good and important one and as political beings it is
absolutely our responsibility to know, care and support, to
work for equality and the right to life but to translate your
life into your art is tacky independently of what it is, and why
should anybody be interested in your issues and problems,
whatever about ecology or your frustrating love life or personal
traumas. You are not your art, and Joseph Beuys is not cool.
independent art cannot support an aesthetic experience, and
yet what the aesthetic experience is, is a sort of collapse of
comprehension, i.e. of dependency, into a moment [however
endlessly short] of utter and excessive independence. Or say it
differently, a collapse of identity into intensity, of perspective
into horizon, of navigation into speed, of survival into the
orgasmic, of reflection into pure production, karaoke to trauma.
To sum up. Art as much as anything else is part of the capitalist
forces, either on the level of expression and representation or
in respect of subsidies, grants, circulation and distribution.
We are fucked no matter what, so now what do we do? There’s
no independent art and has never been, and that is obviously
art’s and our lucky day. There can be more or less independent
art but it’s always and thoroughly inscribed in political
economy, doesn’t matter if it’s some rich guy, the art council,
the church, trust funds, institutional something – there is
no outside. Mind you a radically independent art is not one
you can make a living from, feel a bit successful or not with,
end up in a magazine with, you name it, in fact a radically
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
05
06
Art carries with it that it is potentially produces
or differentiates culture. However, in order for
this production to not coincide with production
in respect of culture, it can not not in the last
instance be contingent.
Culture is through and through inscribed forms
of measure and divisibility. Art on the other hand
always withdraws from divisibility, if on no other
level in respect of supplementary value.
How could somebody possibly consider that art’s responsibility
is to make life chill, to sooth our minds, calm our senses?
Rancière obviously, but harmless. Or even worse to inform us
about injustices, the fact that our world is dying or whatever.
Art’s job is not to be critical, that’s just some hiccup necessary
because of post-structuralism [if Derrida is/was right and with
him Butler, art can only be language and thus conventional,
hence rather than concerned with beauty and the sublime,
art must concern itself with language in either of two ways:
either as forms of meta, e.g. conceptual art, appropriation
etc., or in respect of political economy, and there are too many
examples, perhaps the worst being Martha Rosler or some
collective with two members where one was born in ex-Yugoslavia.
In fact, in art’s job description it’s clearly stated, that the
responsibility is to make life a living hell, a pain in the ass
and confuse us foundationally [philosophy and science suffer
from the same misconception. There’s a reason why the library
has two different shelves one for philosophy the other for selfhelp-realize-yourself
literature. Philosophy is not like holding
someone’s hand.] Art’s job is to be violent… But wait a sec! It’s
defo not any regular punch in the face, attack for fuck’s sake or
bonsai. Not at all, art’s violence is way worse and it’s certainly
not connected to any gangster set-up or army, especially not an
army. Nope, art is and must – particularly under our present
Western and global predicament – be, however embarrassing it
might feel to use D/G terminology in two thousand something
else – a warmachine. As we know those machines that aren’t
apparatuses or dispositive or if at best in reverse, are singular.
They are loners that fight for the sake of fighting and don’t give
a shit about anything else than the battle. Warmachines defy
interpretation and live only in retrospect – when they act they
exist and are not concerned with life, never mind consciousness,
and how could they, they are singular, they are sovereign but
contrary to the king they will do anything to stay out there
in the dark forest, remain in the non-reflective, the libidinal.
/On Dance
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
07
Culture implies the formation and
production of identity and community.
Culture is caring, controlling, conditional
and fundamentally territorial.
When the king fears the sovereignty he’s been given and covers
his tracks with law, courts, parties and babes, the warmachine
withdraws from any form of cheap engagements, withdraws from
being identified and converted into a subject, obviously because
at the very moment it gains identity it’s no longer a warmachine
– no longer sovereign enough, is no longer an object, becomes
economical, reflexive and a matter of affordance and investment.
Now, the thang with machines is that they are as merciless to
themselves as they are to their “enemies,” which is everyone
and body, the body, the law and the temptation to be part of the
army, i.e. be part of “gemeinschaft” and exchange sovereignty
for the anonymity of the assembly [Assemblies are not places
for decisions, for action or refusal but for chitchat, idle talk and
palaver. Spangbergianism p. 20]. The warmachine is ready, always
ready to betray all sides including itself and it does continuously,
however as much as this betrayal is ubiquitous – it spares nobody
or thing – it is also specific in the sense that it carries a tendency
towards being “purely” libidinal. Warmachines fuck probability,
reflexivity, investment and must be contingent. Warmachines
just don’t know the concept of negotiation. Said otherwise, the
warmachine produces no other responsibility than to it self as
it self and it could not be otherwise. Deleuze and Guattari writes
in What Is Philosophy something like, the responsibility of the
artist is the production of the possibility of an altogether different
experience. Obviously they are wrong. It’s so not the artists’ job,
it’s the art that needs to go to work. The artist as an identity
is not causal to his work, nor is an art a causal or directional
representation of the artist’s life, inner being or anything. If this
was the situation Michel Houellebecq should have been brought
to court, Jonathan Meese put away for good and, do I need to say
something about Tracey Emin. However that does not say that
the artist and the art doesn’t function as kind of superimposed
ambiences, related but more like grooves than cousins. If it wasn’t
like that the artist would evidently be judged not on the basis of
aesthetics but in respect of politics, ethics, moral, righteousness.
In other words the art would transform to justifications of the
artist’s life, and perhaps this is exactly what is happening right now
– on several layers – when NL-infused art councils more than ever
instrumentalise artistic production to fit policy documents issued
from above, support minorities, activate kids or countryside, fit
organizational standards, report every cent, organize audience
talks and at the same time be contemporary, urgent, socially
engaged, provocative (a little bit), networked, transparent,
accessible, gender-conscious, queer-active, fireproofed, in short
licensed by the same marketing department that makes both
the IKEA catalogue and the program for The Hayward Gallery.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
08
Art in respect of aesthetic experience implies, concentric yet
not directional (strategic and void of conditions), withdrawal
from or undermining of identity and community. Art in respect
of aesthetic experience therefore is deterritorializing.
Compressed this means, an art that proposes itself as in any
respect valuable, in any respect claims itself as responsible
is always by necessity running errands for NL, it can not be
otherwise. Good attempts, sure it’s great that some artist wants
to distribute syringes to whoever, but what is it as art, what is it
as politics, what is this a moral Mr-freakin’-charity [leave that
to Hollywood] – it’s not art’s job to care for people, and as long as
artists do it we can be sure society won’t spend money doing it. If
we think artists living in Soho or Chelsea had a negative impact
on the speeding up of gentrification, this darkness has now spread
to every area thinkable, and who enjoys it most, aha capitalism,
NL and the suits on Wall Street.
emerge through the production of the possible… and yet, it wont
happen by itself. There is no mistake, there is nothing accidental
going on here [like you know Butler had it, productive mistake
– bleeeuurgh] – not at all, we cannot produce it but we can make
ourselves available to its emergence, and the making-available
must happen through and in language and reason, in history and
through perspective. We make a distinction between conceptual
art – which is all about tautology and translation, and concept art,
which implies to expose the visitor, audience, public to a concept,
an abstract-machine or a machinic-assemblage. Concept art
potentially can be a real pain, verging on fear whereas conceptual
art – at least after 1971 – certainly is like holding hands.
/On Dance
More over, starting with responsibility, identity or community will
reduce art into production of an already possible experience, one
that is only and at best a variation of what is already available. If
we want change, which is certainly not the same as improvement,
possible is not enough. Possible, is measurable, probabilistic,
discrete, critical, political, ethical and moral. See what I mean,
only an art that’s absolutely irresponsible to anything else than to
itself as itself is capable of producing a proper aesthetic experience,
an all together different experience exactly because it has no
relations. Oh no, there’s no guarantees, potentiality can only
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
09
Culture by necessity implies a
coagulation of perspective. Art on
the contrary is an indication of a
fluidization into horizon.
Pronto, an art that takes D/G for serious – the production of
the possibility of an altogether different experience [such an
experience can evidently not be produced hence production is
based on available technologies, organization, knowledge etc. but
can only be the production of possible… ] – must be an art that
makes no aspirations to communicate anything at all, cannot have
political ambitions, no concerns for or against anything at all, it
must dismiss tolerance, openness, negotiation, interpretation,
decency, moral, ethics and politics – it can only communicate
itself as itself, i.e. it is an art that communicates the potentially
of communication, or pure communicability.
It has no identity.
It exists but is not something.
Something forty years ago Godard said, “not a just image, just
an image.” Even longer ago Barnet Newman said: “-What I want
with the paintings? I just want the paint on the canvas to look as
beautiful as it does in the can.”
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
10
Culture implies forms of governance, which initiating moment always is totalitarian. Art is always is
universal, in so much that it is the very absence of governance. Culture therefore is through and through
correlated to politics, whereas art, in respect of aesthetic experience, collapses politics into doctrine,
however a doctrine that refers only to itself as itself. Culture is negotiated whereas art is one.
Two artists that might not conventionally be bunched together
but what appears to connect them is a sort of grand modernist
belief in something, should we say “pure,” and something pure
cannot issue any kind of responsibility, it’s pure because it cannot
produce responsibilities, it has no relations, it’s not a subject,
it is a warmachine. Godard’s “just an image” is an image void
of moral, ethics, politics, it is an image that is void of identity,
of life, and yet exists, similar to Newman’s paintings. It is my
conviction that we today must re-issue Godard and Newman’s
observations although not its modernist pathos – no there’s no
essence around, not since 1969 [Kosuth], even less after 1971
[Nixon dissolves gold standard] and so on… This is not a matter
of searching for an essence, universality, something “pure,” on
the contrary it is rather about the production of its possibility
as potentiality, to make “it” show up, force it out, smoke the shit
– because only that which is “pure,” that which is not subject,
that which is just an image, thing, movement – only that which
is absolutely irresponsible, worthless, can change how change
changes. It can of course only be an endlessly short moment/
an eternity, because the moment when this some something
produces extension, is granted relations, location, context, it
is nothing else than conventional and inscribed in capital, NL,
politics, ethics and moral. But just before that, art can be an
accelerationism [accelerationism must be kept strictly libidinal]
capable of anything, it’s not an openness it’s absolutely open,
it’s unconditional at the last instance, it is as pure as simple
existence, it is and fucks the rest. And you know what, to start
off it sure is capable of setting our entire political economy on
fuckin’ fire. ■
/On Dance
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
a photo essay:
terry2day
/ Hamilton Poe
Terry2day is a project initiated by people living in Detroit’s Cass
Corridor with the intent of documenting the quotidian poststudio
practice of artist/dancer Terrance Williams as he performs
on the corner of Selden Street and Second Avenue. The corner in
which Terry dances plays a pivotal role in the development of the
neighborhood, recently rebranded as “Midtown.” The corner has
seen its parks fenced off, streets changed, and boutique stores
pop up all around. In the midst of this change Terry continues
to dance, subtly perfecting his art form by making public space
his studio. With ritual as practice, his methodical consistency
becomes art in the face of change.
Feel free to submit your documentation of Terry’s latest moves
by Direct Messaging @Terry2day.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
Crowdsourced images serve to document both the neighborhood and his meticulous art form as they occur everyday before our eyes.
Terry2Day is documented through Instagram under the moniker “Terry2day.”
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Sparkle, Glitter, Pop...
or A Field Guide for
Spatial Transgression
/ Allen Gillers
“Instead of places of privacy, where design was unwanted, and
public spaces where architecture had to appear in a correct
guise, here was a place where the most intimate acts, whether
real or acted out in dance, occurred in full view through a
structure of lights, sounds, and arrangements that made it all
seem natural… Looking back on it, this was queer space.”
-Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire 1
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/On Dance
Images by Allen Gillers, courtesy of the artist
In his 1997 rumination on the relationship between queerness
and architecture, architectural critic Aaron Betsky uses the
world of 1980’s New York City dance clubs as a way to define
“queer space.” For him, these spaces defy the strict dichotomy
of private and public through performativity, ephemerality, and
ultimately frivolity. The ephemeral and superficial performances
that defined the extents of their reality is, for Betsky, the way
(predominantly white) gay men spatially presented themselves
in the late 1980’s, in cities across the world that were luxuriating
in the seemingly boundless boom economies of an emerging
neo-liberal globalization. However, as he defines them, these
spaces have an unresolved oscillation between the real and
imaginary. And, as Tom Wolfe popularized in his 1987 novel
Bonfire of the Vanities, the morally bankrupt “Master of the
Universe” mentality that typified these spaces of luxury and
excess, thinly veiled hotbeds of racial and cultural tensions on
the verge of combustion. Consequently, whatever “real” spaces
these performances claimed were only ever momentarily there,
soon after eclipsed by the realities their performances defied.
Today, over thirty years after the cultural moment Betsky
and Wolfe both describe, Detroit can be understood as a city
most intimately familiar with the fallout that these racial,
socio-economic and cultural fault lines fortified. Even as the
city exhibits renewal, these fault lines persist. According to
the 2010 US Census, of the city’s roughly 680,000 occupants,
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almost 83% of them are African American, and almost 40%
are living below the national poverty line. 2 Yet, the majority
of urban revitalization and job growth is targeting an influx
of affluent white suburbanites and, while there seems to be a
notable shift away from fetishizing the criminally abandoned,
coquettishly decayed, and pornographically ruinous dinosaurs of
American Industrialism, how the city emerges out of bankruptcy
is increasingly muted of its longtime occupants’ voices. Pervasive
across various depictions of the current situation are extremist
illustrations that rely on portrayals of a city on the verge of
extinction, or on the brink of renaissance. Detroit is either the
post-apocalyptic zombie land where the American dream has died,
or the ground zero of new beginnings, where conspicuously white
and comparatively wealthy young activists and creatives come to
live out their D.I.Y. dreams or satiate their needy altruism. This
manifestation of the vacillation between real and imagined urban
scenarios, or put another way, reality and its abstraction, echoes
the problem with Betsky’s attempt at defining queerness in space.
By mapping the blurred oscillation between the real and
imagined queer urban subject onto the complicated stage
of a city whose mediated image of itself often precludes the
reality of its inhabitants, the built environment emerges as a
potential setting for political transgression, the black LGBT
community its possible activating agents, and the architect
its potential urban choreographer. By interrogating the rift
between reality and its abstraction both in terms of trying
to articulate a politics of urban conflict, and in trying to
understand Detroit’s dispersed and often invisible black
LGBT community, a meta-choreography becomes the means
by which a collaborative and representative architecture
spatializes, politicizes, and renders the invisible explicit.
For architects, the spatial manifestations of this politico-spatial
oscillation between the real and imagined weaves together
varying political economies across the city to produce a
multitude of intersecting and overlapping borders. Beyond the
municipal boundaries marking Detroit, Hamtramck, Highland
Park, and the suburbs beyond, these other borders reify the
existing cultural boundaries, and in so doing make cultural,
racial and economic segregation spatially manifest. The queer
urban subject, both represented collectively as Detroit’s black
LGBT community and as individuals, subverts the fixed spatial
narratives of these cultural boundaries by existing, oftentimes
invisibly, across many simultaneous urban terrains. As a
dispersed network of people across the city, because of their
already transgressive spatial reality, the LGBT community has
a unique potential to catalyze significant urban transformation
that embraces difference rather than externalizing it.
In an interview by Christian Höller for DOCUMENTA
MAGAZINE N°3, Jacques Rancière articulates this method
of politicization, claiming “Politics is not about integrating
the excluded in our societies. It is about restaging matters of
exclusion as matters of conflict, of opposition between worlds.” 3
This attitude towards the political provides the foundation for
Rancière’s fundamentally novel connection between Aesthetics
and Politics. For Rancière, “politics revolves around what is seen
and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see
and the talent to speak.” 4 Aesthetics function as its corollary, as “
forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they
occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ … ‘ways of doing and making’ that
intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making
as well as the relationships they maintain to modes of being
and forms of visibility.” 5 For Rancière aesthetics and politics
meet in the way in which they each relate to the distribution of
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the sensible. Politics involves understanding the distribution
of the sensible and how it is mediated; aesthetics allow for the
articulation between the visible and invisible, audible and
inaudible, sayable and unsayable, which in turn continually
redefine the distribution of the sensible. Using this understanding
of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, the architect
has the potential to mobilize a particular community’s political
agency through deploying the politics of a transgressive
aesthetic narrative. Like the images of Nick Cave’s soundsuits
in Greetings From Detroit, captured throughout the city’s
iconic sites where they seemingly don’t belong, and the way they
destabilize the viewer’s relationship to the images they construct,
the goal of an architectural urban choreography is to politicize
through a representational game of destabilizing aesthetics.
In light of this opportunity we proposed a mobile LGBT
community signage, which seeks to embrace this reality by
defying the fixity of a permanent building’s location, and aligns
itself with the transgressive nature of Detroit’s queer urban
subject. Collectively designed and built with Detroit LGBT
youth from across the city, this dispersed mobile sign hopes to
become a roving icon, inverting the superficially hidden and
historically closeted community, weaving in and out of a range
of urban, political, social and economic border conditions,
while encountering difference in each of the worlds it inhabits.
The parts of the sign will never quite belong in any of these
locations, and will continuously destabilize an unknowing
viewer’s understanding of who has a right to any given public
space. The project was conceived collectively, through developing
a close relationship with LGBT Detroit (www.lgbtdetroit.org)
over the course of a year, understanding the varied makeup
of its constituents, and trying to combat a city’s increasing
gentrification, where rent prices are currently threatening its
very presence in Detroit. We designed four discrete carts, which
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each separately attach to bikes and can be ridden across the
cities varied landscapes. Individually they are sassy, cheeky,
and colorful mobile installation pieces. Collectively they come
together through a combination of anamorphic projection
and moire patterning to read “LGBT DETROIT.” The project
culminated in a collaborative performance of design, staged
on July 25th at the 20th Anniversary of Detroit’s annual black
gay pride, Hotter Than July celebration in Palmer Park,
Detroit. Celebrants were invited to participate in painting and
assembling the final stages of the sign's four discrete parts,
and after the annual Vogue Ball, they were invited to ride along
in the inaugural “gay slow roll,” showcasing the new mobile
signage to a lightly raining, misty Detroit summer evening.
1 Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire
(New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997), 5.
2 http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/26/2622000.html
3 Christian Höller and Jacques Rancière, “The Abandonment of
Democracy,” Documenta Magazine, no. 3: Education (2007): 23.
4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2013), 8.
5 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8.
To borrow from Rancière, this project is an attempt to shake up
the status quo, challenge the distribution of Detroit’s current
sensibility and make room for a group of marginalized youth who
are trying to find their voice in an urban transformation which
is rapidly sequestering them into irrelevance. The goal is for this
project to offer a potentially new form of community engaged
design that embraces the profound knowledge of its collaborators
in producing true urban commons. While the stories of who
urban transformation serves here in Detroit is unavoidably
enmeshed in racist and classist structures, the question
of queerness, inextricably entangled in these struggles,
has the capacity for new political purchase in rethinking
urban space. Beyond the ephemerality and performativity
of Betsky’s “queer space,” rethinking the very borders of
built space has the potential to allow for a new protagonist
in catalyzing urban change. Borders, real or imagined,
visible or invisible, dictate the way we move through our daily
lives. As architects and designers, thinking about our role
in negotiating the public spaces of our urban environments,
these borders create a complex web upon which we have the
potential to help choreograph new modes of urban life. ■
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We Place
Ourselves
/ Leyya Mona Tawil
DANCE ELIXIR, Day of the Innocents [Enter the Martyr]. Photo by
Ricardo Esway, courtesy of Leyya Mona Tawil.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/
The social choreography of Arab experimentalism.
Accumulations for The Martyr – a score for performance,
visual and literary transmission.
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We place ourselves in space: The Work, The Workers, The Warriors, The War.
THE WORK
We were always awake.
We own our narrative.
We own our references.
Context changes hands so easily. I try to grab hold.
2065BC
Photo by Nurah Faraha
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
“When things are so hard to see, to discern,
at times like ours full of ruptures, we don’t
know anymore what is content from what is
context. In my case I consciously decided
to study context as content, and to go full
heartedly for investing into recreating contexts.”
/On Dance
Adham Hafez. Artist, Curator, Scholar.
Director of HaRaKa Platform.
re-narration is constant.
Qubais Reed Ghazala invents circuit-bending.
Jehan Mullin conjures titles for fires.
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THE WORKERS
I forgo legibility.
Resolve is personal.
We operate independently.
We tether for perspective.
Individualism does not erase our cultural belonging.
Sam Shalabi reminds us that validation is a trap.
Julius Masri, Night Raids, anger, commodity, satire.
Donia Jarrar cuts water with her own absolutions.
Mona Gamil teaches us the benefits of becoming a SAP [Safe Art Practices].
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Atlas
Photo by Doug Coombe
“The Arab avant garde is made up of those who
work to create something new, on the fringe or
experimental in nature, while bringing their
Arab experience to bear. I think the many ways
that our art is based upon our identity, or lack
thereof, manifests itself as Arab regardless
of how subtle or overt the incorporation.”
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Mike Khoury. Musician, Composer, Researcher.
Director of Detroit music label Entropy Stereo Recordings.
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THE WARRIORS
Blood cannot be disassociated from action.
We stand in ancestral and political perspective. A future self springs
from this well.
We whisper community secrets.
I put my ear to the ground, and listen for my cohorts.
We find each other.
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Autobiography of a Warrior
Photo by Fiestaban Photography
“We are working to break the historical
narrative. To decolonize our work.”
/On Dance
Rosario Lionudakis: Artist, Writer, Educator.
Director of Zari Le’on Dance Theater.
Mark Gergis releases the album I Remember Syria in 2004.
Porest releases the album Tourrorists! in 2006.
Sham Palace.
AANM, DIWAN, a lighthouse.
Laila and Leila and Layla, alef leyla…
The Brothers are Unconnected.
Cherif El Masri destroys Cairo.
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THE WAR
Reference irreverence.
Fuck your version.
Our resilience is cultural.
There is power in our discord.
Post-national gives way to improvisation.
Experimentation is not negation.
Nostalgia is the enemy.
Absolution.
The Brothers are Unconnected.
Cherif El Masri destroys Cairo.
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Day of the innocents [enter The Martyr] Photo by Ricardo Esway Photography, courtesy of the artist
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“I set out to write an article about the Arab Avant Garde, and in
the process sorted through an ocean of divergent and convergent
ideologies from my community. I abandoned the attempt to
capture the Arab Avant Garde and instead turned inward to
define my own practices. I associate my words and the work of
my comrades in order to offer a glimpse.
I place myself in space.
Let me be explicit – this is not a singular statement on behalf of
Arab experimentalists. I humbly attempt to make visible the
ways in which we relate ourselves to our worlds.
How we act, interact and transform. Shapeshifters.
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The Martyr is the container; I choose my archetypes, I forgo
legibility. The Martyr is a score that is still landing; it will
ultimately be interpreted for performance, visual and literary
transmission.
It begins with absolution.”
Leyya Mona Tawil. Artist, Researcher, Performer.
Director of DANCE ELIXIR and TAC: Temescal Arts Center.
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CODA
I have constructed this choreography by assuming things.
The accumulation is personal; I reference years of conversation and
participation.
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I thank you: Mike Khoury, Rosario Lionudakis, Adham Hafez, Jehan
Mullin, Brian Rogers, Mark Gergis, Donia Jarrar, Richard Bishop, Osama
Shalabi, Laila Shereen Sakr, Leila Oum Kulthoum Tayeb, Layla Farhan,
Maysoun Freij, Julius Masri, Dominic Cramp, Mike Guarino, Katherine
Toukhy, Marwa Helal, Ramsey Ameen, Mona Gamil, Cherif El Masri,
Qubais Reed Gazaleh and Devon Akmon.
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4 Poems
/Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Two Souls
Two souls collide in a moment perfected by grace,
by a super power some of us only know as God.
In such untethered intrepid strides, they collide
leaving no room for chance, no space for mistakes.
Consider for a moment, this moment: the parents
of their parents and then their ancestors all linked,
all impeccably placed and timed. Of course,
this union specified before you or I could even see,
/On Dance
could even breathe… Soul and soul collide
and so the result can only be love: a blessing
more ancient than the dinosaur, older than the world,
shattering dimensions and science - a blessing
traversing the heavens, falling up like prayers, like feathers.
Close your eyes and witness how angels fly all around us.
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Effigy
Marfa Lights
Was it Tina or Peaches, one of my mother’s
vindictive personalities, who set the house
on fire with her brother still in it? When
I went to visit him in the Burned Victims Unit,
the doctors had just finished ventilating his lungs.
The hours hung long around his muscular-melted frame
like a bandage. Medical devices worked electric magic
to keep him alive. The past five nights, he’d spent
locked in an air chamber. Finally out of danger,
God was a reflection in the room - in the mirrors,
the windows, anything that let light in. The day
the gauze and layers of cotton were removed,
he was unrecognizable cooked meat.
His mother said he was such a beautiful man,
had such nice feet. The ten years after the blaze,
Lucifer took the shape of a drink he could not
put down. Now, uncle is the 40-year-old living definition
of a burnt blessing staggering in new skin, only
a trace of physical heat is left. Epidermal theft.
Crazy mother, you lifted the man’s clothes right off
his back. Scorched shirt singed while on the rack;
ignite the black leather coat. Some nights he wakes
in the hot rooms of his body still filled with smoke.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles...
-Audre Lorde
For weeks we spoke
of the desert lights in Marfa
until finally they spoke back,
so we ran into their voices,
shaping them into bodies
that danced and prayed
and cried much like our own.
Wild as orphaned children
pissed at our dead parents
for having not loved us better,
we ran to the desert
crafting spells that screamed
to our losses and our dreams,
screamed to our ancestors,
their bones buried in secret.
Chanting Audre Lorde poems
at the top of our lungs
until our throats hurt
and our hearts swelled,
off Route 67 we became
desert twins, sisters
of the dust, dusk bathing us
in her sweat and her night.
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Placed Between Loss and Living
for my brother
I suppose, if I’ve learned anything,
it’s all been tethered to loss. My
16 year old self, lowering
my mother’s body down
into that black earth, and now,
exactly 16 years later,
I’m back at this same place,
same broken body, same face.
But this time it’s not my mother,
it’s her son, and he is just as
fragile as he is strong. His
22 year old self: long and muscular,
dark and bruised, punished
and weathered. I lie him down,
like an offering to God. I say,
Lord, I am still here. I will obey.
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#negrophobia
/ Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and Kate Hess
a photo collaboration
All photos courtesy of the artist
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“Bad Bitches”
and the Disruption of Black Masculine
Supremacy at The Ultimate White Party
2014 (Midwest Edition)
/Michelle Cowin-Mensah
Dance: a state of excitement in a system where change
becomes possible, desirable, fluid and pleasurable. 1
-Jeffrey Gormly
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
INTRODUCTION
Hundreds of Metropolitan Detroiters crowded the Riverside Marina off the Detroit River to attend
“the world[’s] largest nightclub” (“The Ultimate Group”). The Ultimate White Party, 2014 (Midwest
Edition) was anything but an ordinary nightclub. The event promoters invited local vendors to
transform the Marina’s tennis courts into an outdoor showroom. Merchant Vendor Row featured
soul food, urban street wear, authorized cell phone retailers, and African American hair products.
Corporate sponsors like MAC Cosmetics set up makeover stations, and Macy’s sponsored Red Carpet
Photo Booths that instantly uploaded photos to social media. Dozens of individuals and local businesses
purchased white cabanas from $1K - $2,5K per tent, turning the perimeter of the marina into a South
Beach Miami resort. BRICKK ENT, a production company representing local rap artists, dominated The
Ultimate White Party, in size and cabanas. The company had a total of four tents. The male members
of the company dressed in bright oversized white polos with red letters in caps “BRICKK ENT” on the
backside and matching hats. BRICKK ENT cabanas were located closer to the perimeter of the dance
floor than any other cabanas and were closer to the walkways that provided easy access to Merchant
Vendor Row and the Clubhouse. 2 BRICKK ENT had no female representation at The White Party that
I witnessed. Those women who did party with the company in their cabanas did not appear to be part
of the organization. They did not wear the iconic red and white polos, nor did they wear anything that
would associate them with BRICKK. Like the rest of us at The White Party, 2014, they were spectators,
witnesses to the event, and above all given permits to specific areas of the party by those who ball.
/On Dance
In Detroit hip-hop culture, Black masculinity tends to mirror hegemonic White masculinity and
inform the ways in which Black men subjugate Black women. According to Patricia Hill Collins in “A
Telling Difference: Dominance, Strength, and Black Masculinities,” hegemonic White masculinity sets
up the parameters of male/female relationships. Collins’s states that “hegemonic [White] masculinity
reflects a cognitive framework of binary thinking that defines masculinity in terms of its difference
from and dominance over multiple others.” 3 As a result, hegemonic White masculinity asserts what
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Collins calls the strong-black-women-weak-black-men trope. Thus, to define Black masculinity
against what it is not (Black femininity), the relationship between Black men and Black women can be
contested and at times highly volatile. BRICKK ENT’s misogynist behaviorisms towards Black women
at The Ultimate White Party reflect gendered attitudes towards Black female Detroiters. At The White
Party, these demeaning and objectifying attitudes forced Black women into a type of spectatorship.
Black female Detroiters were encouraged to be both simultaneously present and not present. Although
Black men confided female Detroiters to the audience, these Black women also complicated Black
masculine presupposed gendered identities that rendered them as spectators. In this article, I will
look at the ways in which Black female Detroiters used performance as a mode of resistance against
Black masculine supremacist practices at The Ultimate White Party, 2014. Loosely deconstructing
the term dance to include social choreographic thinking as a conscious way of rationalizing movement
to work in/through oppressive environments, I will examine how Black female Detroiters use
movement to negotiate Detroit hip-hop culture, which hinges on static notions of authentic blackness.
“WHERE ALL MY BAD BITCHES AT?”
When Mike Epps arrived on stage, the Black male members associated with BRICKK ENT rushed the
stage. Using flashlights and cell phones, they hand selected other BRICKK ENT members and male
friends to enter the stage. The man standing next to me phoned his cousin. Instantaneously, he was
waved to the stage. The stage was full of Black men. The women stood around in confusion. One of
the event promoters (a Black woman) was stopped by BRICKK ENT as she tried to enter the stage. Her
entourage, which comprised of all Black men, tried to dismiss them. It was not until another event
promoter (another Black man) saw the commotion and stepped in to vouch for his colleague that
BRICKK moved out of her way. Once on stage, the Black female event promoter stopped the music and
addressed the crowd, urging them to calm down. She said no one else was permitted onstage due to
weight restrictions. Mike Epps clips in, “No more ratchet bitches to the stage.” Everyone laughed. The
Black woman next to me screamed in laughter. The music came on again. Mike Epps shouts: “Where
the real niggas at?! Where the real niggas at?! Bad bitches, Real Niggas.” The music started back up.
The music stopped again. The Black female event promoter addressed Mike Epps and BRICKK
ENT and tells them the men must leave the stage due to weight restrictions. “Mike, I’m going to
let you get back to your party in a second. Ladies and gentlemen, please. Right now, the DJ booth
is too heavy. I have a weight restriction.” A few Detroit Police Officers came up on stage. They did
not appear to remove any of the men from the stage but stood in observation. The Black female
event promoter: “I need you to calm down. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a major issue-” At
that moment, there was a group full of BRICKK ENT men trying to get on the stage. The women
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around me erupted in chants of disapproval, screaming “NO MORE DICKS!” and “WHERE DA’
LADIES AT?” Hearing the chants and disapproval, Mike Epps encouraged all the men to exit
the stage and eagerly invited women to join him. The women in the audience cheered and some
advanced towards the stage only to be pushed back by a line of BRICKK ENT men. By this point,
BRICKK ENT was even restricting waitresses to come onstage. Meanwhile, BRICKK ENT men,
as well as well-known Black male political leaders in the community, took turns shaking hands
and taking pictures with Mike Epps. I could see large bottles of Hennessy cognac and champagne
being passed from man to man. There were also takeaway containers of food in the VIP
section reserved for Mike Epps and his entourage but now BRICKK ENT men filled the section.
Event security swarmed around the entire stage, blocking more men from entering. BRICKK
ENT men who were not onstage, argued and attempted to push their way to the front. Soon
there was a standoff between BRICKK ENT men and event security. The women around me
complained about the men to each other, while some yelled out for the men to get off of the
stage. I did not see any women physically challenge the BRICKK ENT men. There were audible
disapproval and the women around me made comments like, “What the fuck?” “Fuck these dicks!”
“Get off the fuckin’ stage!” “Get yo’ ass off the fuckin’ stage.” Soon the Fire Marshall appeared
and commanded that no one else get on stage, or he would permanently shut down the party.
Feelings of confusion, resentment, and anger swept through the crowd like an active volcano
brewing, sputtering, and finally spilling over to everyone. The Black female event promoter
continued to urge the crowd to calm down. The promoters displayed messages on the video monitors
surround the stage, “Get off the Stage.” Ladies around me screamed, “Oh my God, get the fuck
off the stage! It’s too much dick on the stage!” Suddenly Mike Epps’s voice cranked in, “Let’s get
this mutha-fuckin’ party started, DETROIT!” The women in the crowd screamed and cheered.
Mike’s voice excited them but just as soon as he is done hypin’, which is less than 15 seconds; he
disappears, swallowed up in the sea of BRICKK men. Two men pushed past me, and I hit the
Black woman in front of me. She shot me an angry glare, and I quickly apologized. I pointed
to the men who shoved past me. They were both from BRICKK ENT. We shared a knowing look.
The men had rushed past us in a strange desperation to get closer to the commotion on the stage.
No sooner did the men past me when we saw them gathered at the front of the stage. Along with
another few BRICKK ENT men already in position, the men pushed their way towards the event
security. The music started up again. “Bitch betta have my money!” From the left side of the stage,
a BRICKK ENT man helped another partner onstage. Mike Epps chants “All the Bad Bitches out
here...” Two more men jumped up. “East side, west side...” One more man hurled himself up onto
the stage. “All the Bad Bitches, all the Real Niggas.” The women around me were quiet. There was
a mixture of resentment and yearning in their facial expressions. The tension in their bodies
betrayed them: they wanted to be up there too. They wanted to be included. Strangely, I felt this
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too. I could see my brother and his girl onstage. We made eye contact. I leaned towards the stage,
and he looked around tentatively. Hopelessly, he shook his head. I was confined to the crowd.
Historically, Black men have often held Black women to genderized representations of a male
constructed Black femininity in Detroit. The politics of Black female respectability often forced
Black women to focus on issues in support of Black masculinity. Angela D. Dillard in Faith in the City:
Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit notes that in the nineteenth century, the Black church
often provided Black women with an avenue from which to engage in broader social, political, economic,
and cultural debates. 4 However, debates usually centered on Black women securing sustainable
employment to support their families, rather than debates concerning their fundamental rights as
seen in White feminist movements during the same time. Dillard notes that Black women also faced
the most obstacles when obtaining industrial work than either Black men or White women. 5 These
women often found themselves working without the support of Black men to help secure employment
for their families. Additionally, as the city shifted towards Black Nationalist ideologies, this left
little room for discussion on Black female employment. Edna Ewell Watson, a political protester
and member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the 1970s, notes in Dan Georgakas
and Marvin Surkin's book, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying that she was expected to be supportive of
male leadership. 6 Watson states that there was no lack of roles for women in the League as long as
they accepted subordination to the greater needs of the organization, which was male-dominant. 7
At The White Party, Black masculine misogyny and White racist antagonisms toward the Black female
body render Black femininity overtly antagonistic (the angry Black woman trope) or passively nonexistent
(the Mammy trope). However, there is a more complicated negotiation Black women undergo
when encountering misogyny and racism that hinges on creating authentic representations of blackness. 8
At The White Party, Mike Epps (arguably the epitome of Black masculine desire at the event) asked
for all the Real Niggas and the Bad Bitches to “make some noise.” The crowd, including all of the
Black women, erupted in cheers, hoots, and hollers. By Epps acknowledging Black women as Bad
Bitches, he encouraged two things: (1) acceptance of Black masculine desire and the Black woman
as objects of that desire, and (2) Black femininity that can be traced to an authentic blackness. 9 In
the first, Black women must be willing participants of Black masculine desire in Detroit hip-hop
culture. This is not to say that Black women must willingly submit to Black masculine desire. On
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the contrary, Bad Bitches acknowledge Black masculine desire in ways that make it clear that they,
as the objects of desire, are in control. Stephane Dunn in Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas:
Black Power Action Films, notes that hip-hop iconography perceives black female sexuality as
liberated and free. 10 She comments that “In rap music culture, ‘bitch’ has also been revised as ‘Bitch’
to signify a hardcore woman who makes money and proudly flaunts her sexual libido and sexuality.
She is the ‘around the way sista’ who can hold her own with the gangsta thugs of rap music.” 11
Although the term Bitch symbolizes a historical reclamation from White patriarchy, today’s Bad
Bitch according to Dunn is a label and persona that functions as a mode of expression. Dunn states:
It [Bad Bitch] offers the allure of transgression, a
seductive construction for women and especially for
historically devalued women in U.S. celebrity culture [...]
The ‘Bad Bitch’ suggests a black woman from workingclass
roots who goes beyond the boundaries of gender in
a patriarchal domain and plays the game as successfully
as the boys by being in charge of her own sexual
representation and manipulating it for celebrity
and material gain. 12
In a YouTube video taken at the event, a popular local porn star named The Body XXX is walking
around the marina with her friends. In the video, she is wearing a white Charmeuse romper. The
suit has a dropped V-neck down the center of the outfit. On the backside, the suit barely covers
her buttock. The Body is eating a piece of fried chicken as she walks. A young Black man with a
camera crew approaches her claiming to be from a Detroit reality TV show. It is clear from the
video that she is not interested in being interviewed or even speaking to the man. The man calls
after her and continuously follows her. It is unclear from the video what he is saying to her to
attract her attention. The Body continues eating and does her best to ignore him. The man blocks
her path. She immediately attempts to toss the chicken at the camera. The man says, “Whoa!
What you doing?” The two dance around each other as the man is now blocking the camera from
the incoming chicken. The Body remains silent and walks away. The man continues to pursue
her. This time the camera pans down to a shot of her buttock. The man approaches the woman’s
backside and rubs on her buttocks. The woman continues to eat chicken and walks away. The man
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says, “Hey look, this is 2014 White Party. Show ‘em how we doing it. Look! Look! This how we doing
it.” The woman takes the piece of half eaten chicken and dangles the meat near her buttocks. The
man says, “Yo! Put yo’ name on it!” The camera lingers on The Body’s buttock as she walks away. 13
Without knowing the socio-economic status of both participants in the video, it is difficult to pinpoint
if, in fact, The Body matches Dunn’s criteria of a Bad Bitch. However, it is easy to gauge from her
reactions towards the young Black man, that she is performing traits one could associate with Bad
Bitch. Her mannerisms towards the young man convey that she is in charge of her sexual image
despite the frequent tries on behalf of the young man to objectify her. This performance, for me, is
part of an everyday act of resistance to anti-misogynist practices towards Black women in Detroit
hip-hop culture. The movements located in these performances are rehearsed and restaged at the
discretion of Black hip-hop masculinity. The attempt seems to be for Black female Detroiters in hiphop
culture to find spaces of social acceptance in a mostly masculine supremacist state. According
to Andrew Hewitt in Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday
Movement, those who use dance as a method of social change understand how movement can be a
powerful motivator for materialist and aesthetic ideology. 14 Similarly, Patricia Hill Collins notes
in Black Sexual Politics: Black women often objectify their bodies to be accepted within a Black
male-controlled universe. 15 Nowhere is this more apparent than when The Body dangled the piece
of chicken meat over her buttock. However, in Detroit hip-hop culture and in particular reference
to my experiences at The White Party, Black masculine antagonisms towards Black women were
rampant. This comes as no surprise. Global racist patriarchal culture commercially seeks to
redefine Black femininity as weak. However, Detroit, which is still overwhelming Black and poor,
has a large Black youth population which sees hip-hop as their only option for getting out of the
hood. Rightfully so, according to Tricia Rose in her book The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About
When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It Matters, which argues that Detroit along with other
metropolitan cities during the recession saw major population declines, and urban destruction of
abandoned homes without renewal leading thus to increase in violence and youth displacement. 16
Black youth’s do or die perspective in a global mainstream marketplace wherein Black rappers
are encouraged to displace and reject Black femininity leaves Black youth with very few options
for survival, let alone how to address Black womanhood. Additionally, while current Detroit hiphop
artists are doing a lot to bring attention to Detroit in terms of the impact of poverty on Black
communities, very little attention is being paid to positively representing Black womanhood.
For example, in Detroit rapper YCG’s 2013 music video titled Racks, 17 the artist and his entourage
effortlessly toss green bills at scantily clad women who are twerking. In the opening shot, the women
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(all Black) are facing away from the camera as they dance. They are dressed in sexy thongs and
bikini tops. The camera quickly pans to automobile tire rims of all styles and variety. The images
throughout the video continue to cut between scantily clad Black women, Black female characters as
sexual deviants, and other markers of material wealth (Racks). Similarly rising hip-hop rapper and
fellow Detroiter, Danny Brown, whose music is primarily focused on and in Detroit, often highlights
the socioeconomic disparities from the perspectives of Black communities. In Guitar Solo, Brown
shows viewers the perspectives of two young black youths, one Black girl, and one Black boy. In both
instances, the young adults are forced to make decisions for the betterment of themselves with no
emotional support from their families. The young Black boy takes up petty theft to escape his povertystricken
home life, and the young Black girl is pregnant with no options (“Guitar Solo”). 18 She hopes
to find security with a drug dealer to support her unborn child (“Guitar Solo”). In both instances we
see Black youths forced to make decisions because their single-parent mothers are unable to cope.
The young boy’s mother is a prostitute and according to Brown, “a fiend” (“Guitar Solo”). In the video,
the young girl’s mother relies on other men to support her and has little concern for her daughter’s
welfare. In the video, we can see the young boy’s mother counting money in semi-darkness. The
young girl’s mother is seen walking around the house with a man. She hands her daughter a small
boy, and the couple goes into another room. In another segment, the mother is seen twerking in what
looks like her bathroom in mismatched bra and panties (“Guitar Solo”). In this video, Detroit Black
womanhood is a marathon for the survival of the fittest. The women portrayed are bottom-feeders
who commit licentious acts to survive harsh conditions in Post-Recession Detroit. Although Danny
Brown depicts these Black women as “fiends,” he also complicates their narratives by showing the
cyclical nature of poverty. These women might be morally complicated but according to Brown, their
struggle is part of a larger story that stems from being forgotten; a mantra that many Detroiters feel.
/On Dance
“SIGN MY NAME ON IT”
Racist patriarchal binaries distort images of Black female Detroiters in Detroit’s hip-hop culture
as victims or victimizers. In many songs and music videos, Black Detroit women are single-mothers
caught in the trappings of socio-economic decline by no fault of their own. In other videos, Black
women are narcissistic gold diggers whose greatest pleasure is to prove loyalty to their men. These
Bad Bitches will stop at nothing to get what they want, including terrorizing and debasing others –
particularly other Black women. Black Detroit female hip-hop artists rarely portray themselves as
victims or hood angels, but opt to take on the position of the victimizer or Bad Bitch persona. For
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example, Selena Jordan is a nineteen year old rising star on Detroit’s hip-hop scene. Her music videos
and appearances stream on YouTube to thousands of fans, and she was a featured performer at The
White Party, 2014. Flanked by three scantily clad backup dancers, Jordan in a short mid-thigh minidress
with a low front, clipped snappy lyrics about her magic-like abilities to attract men and dismiss
women. In the song, she proclaimed that she was a Bad Bitch and dared anyone to challenge her powers.
Dripping with long straight black hair down her back, she often strutted back and forth from the front
of the stage, hip rolled into a crouch, and rose into a twerk dance movement. I noticed the audience
reactions to Jordan’s performance. Many of them were actively engaged in the performance. It was
obvious this was their first time hearing Jordan’s song. They attentively listened and watched her
performance with intense stares. Many of them simultaneously held up smartphones to capture the
experience, while watching her live performance onstage. At the end of the performance, the crowd
did not cheer with hoots and hollers, but calmly applauded her efforts and went back to meandering
around the marina until the next performance was set. I caught Jordan as she exited the stage for a
quick response to her performance. I applauded her skills as a performer and asked her if she was
from Detroit. She warmly smiled and graciously said, “Thank you, and yes, I’m from here.” “Did
you write that song yourself?” I asked. “Oh yes. I write all my songs.” “Does your life as a Detroiter
reflect the kind of stuff you write?” “Yes, some of it does.” I got her information with the intent to
formally interview her about her performance, but after The White Party, Jordan could not be reached.
One observation that I made from my interaction with Jordan after her performance was the immediate
change in her demeanor. Her smile was genuine warm and welcoming. She was gracious and open with
wide eyes during our short interaction. There was none of the Bad Bitch persona that she performed
on stage. There was no conceit or pretentious behavior so commonly personified in the performance
of Bad Bitch. Jordan’s shift from Bad Bitch reflects what Stephane Dunn calls the problematic and
masculine-centered aesthetic of “keeping it real.” 19 Dunn notes that rap music and hip-hop culture
valorize thug life as real blackness. The patriarchal racial condemnation of Black masculinity as
weak and Black femininity as invisible are reflected in the community and expressed in the music. 20
Expressions of social codes as culture in rap music that signify a real blackness, according to Dunn,
become ways artists “appreciate the truths about the hardship of ghetto life.” 21 Similarly, Black women
as rap artists in hip-hop culture are also responsible for upholding an image that coincides with
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masculine street ideologies surrounding real blackness. The performance of Bad Bitch in some ways
upholds Black masculine patriarchy as a reflection of thug life in that reality. According to Dunn, rap
star Lil’ Kim performed a representation of Black femininity as the Bad Bitch and used her sexuality to
appear loyal to the game or thug life. 22 Dunn further argues that Lil’ Kim’s loyalty was also contingent
on her willingness to submit to Black masculine dominance whenever necessary. Dunn states: “An
intrinsic part of that identity remains the idea of a woman who will ‘trick’ for her main man and destroy
anyone- other ‘bitches’ or male enemies- who attempt to bring that man down figuratively or literally.” 23
In my brief conversation with Selena Jordan, it was clear that she did not buy into the Bad Bitch persona.
She performed a representation of authentic Black femininity, according to the expectations of real
Black Detroit masculinity. For example, in another segment of the same YouTube video taken at The
White Party, the young Black man is standing behind a Black woman. He has both arms wrapped
around her shoulders and is tightly holding on to her. As she moves forward, he moves with her. They
are both looking directly at the camera. The woman is signifying with her right hand her hometown
of East Warren, Michigan. The woman’s performance of Bad Bitch is clear, as she rotates her head
and rolls her upper body. Her vocal pitch and rhythm matches that of the young man still holding her.
“East Warren ... Oh yeah! All day, every day!” 24 There is a very hard and imperious look in her eyes that
seem to match the young man behind her. As the young man is rocking to the music with the woman
in his arms, he lifts his left arm. The woman’s stance shifts and she ease herself out of the young
man’s grasp. Once free she immediately relaxes her tough posture and a huge smiles crosses over her
/On Dance
face. Unbeknownst to the young man, the two celebrate and bounce to the music. “Hey! Oh!” 25
In this segment, it is unclear who began the exchange since the video immediately cuts to the couple
mid-interaction. However, what makes their exchange interesting is the dramatic shift from the
Bad Bitch persona to a more light-hearted and relaxed persona. The woman signifies with hand
gestures to commemorate her neighborhood as the Bad Bitch. During this brief moment, there
is a habitual quality to her movements that feel rehearsed and prepared. She may not be the Bad
Bitch, but she certainly knows Black masculine interpretations of class-based Black femininity
to enact a representation of what Black men want. The large Black man hanging on her back
attempts to possess her body; giving her vocal cues on how hardcore Bad Bitches are supposed to act.
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CONCLUSION
In conclusion, The Ultimate White Party, 2014 (Midwest Edition) brought hundreds of metropolitan
Detroiters together to experience authentic Detroit hip-hop culture. However, the terms of engagement
differed dramatically for Black women than Black men. This is not to say that all Black men did
not experience biased and gendered oppression at The White Party. I did not discuss how Black
masculine supremacy also attempts to conflate blackness and Black male identity, limiting the
possibilities for all Black men regardless of class, age, or sexual orientation. However, at The
White Party, the constitution of Black Detroit female identity within Detroit hip-hop culture was
invariably connected with Black masculine supremacist notions of authentic blackness. As a result,
Black female Detroiters were rendered spectators. Detroit hip-hop culture’s gendered expectations
of Black femininity created the rupture that isolated Bad Bitches to the crowd and Mike Epps’ real
niggas to the stage. However, Black women did not suffer in the wings. They were active spectators
engaging in a social choreography that called attention to the politics of racial patriarchy and
Black masculine supremacy in Detroit hip-hop culture. Using movement as a way of articulating
their positionalities, these women attempted to negotiate the murky gender politics of Detroit hiphop
culture within the racist and sexist ideologies that subordinate both Black men and women.
One of the most interesting points of contention is how racism and performance both contribute to
gender biases in Detroit hip-hop culture. Black female Detroiters are held accountable for creating
an authentic blackness that mirrors the ways in which Black men have been expected to uphold
the ideologies of White masculinity. Therefore as an act of survival, Black male Detroiters enact
performative behaviorisms that hinge on the expectations of White superiority in an attempt to
be recognized as human. Black women, while still being held to those same standards, experience
multiple oppression from both Black and White supremacy. The misogynist performatives that
subjugate Black Detroit womanhood in hip-hop are made present through multiple representations
of Black female Detroiters as victims or victimizers. Black female Detroiters in an act of survival
in hip-hop culture simultaneously attempt to resist and reconstruct negative images of self
through performances that complicate a presupposed real blackness. The performance of Bad
Bitches is for some a deliberate performance that does not constitute a single Black female Detroit
identity in hip-hop culture. Rather, this is a performance for what it is: a performance of survival.
Racist patriarchy and sexist ideologies have strongly influenced the politics of Black identity
in this country, as we (Black men and women alike) have historically felt and presently feel. ■
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1 Jeffrey Gormly, “Raw Thinking: What is a State of Dance?,” choreograph.net (June 11, 2011).
2 The Clubhouse featured a full dinner buffet and snack bar for individuals who purchased VIP
tickets at $60 (regular entrance was $40).
3 Patricia Hill Collins, “A Telling Difference: Dominance, Strength, and Black Masculinities,” in
Progressive Black Masculinities, ed. Athena D. Muthua (New York: Routledge, 2006), 74.
4 Cf. Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2007), 5.
5 Cf. Dillard, Faith in the City, 123.
6 Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 224.
7 Cf. Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, 225.
8 Cf., for example, Patrick E. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of
Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
9 Cf., for example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press,
1992).
10 Cf. Stephane Dunn, Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2008), 26.
11 Dunn, Baad Bitches, 26.
12 Dunn, Baad Bitches, 27.
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13 The Ultimate white Party 2014 (the fight), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN8jFgkGuEI.
Accessed 05.01.16.
14 Cf. Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday
Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 5.
15 Cf. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 129.
16 Cf. Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It
Matters (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008), 45.
17 Racks, dir. TandB Films, prod. BRICKK ENT, perf. YCG, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=BvNaZ_kuj00. Accessed 05.01.16.
18 Danny Brown, “Guitar Solo,” from The Hybrid, dir. Tony ‘Storymode’ Foster, Rappers I Know Prod;
Hybrid Music Prod, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAG1TCSTVTc. Accessed 05.01.16.
19 Cf. Dunn, Baad Bitches, 24-26.
20 Cf. Dunn, Baad Bitches, 25.
21 Dunn, Baad Bitches, 25.
22 Cf. Dunn, Baad Bitches, 29.
23 Dunn, Baad Bitches, 29.
24 The Ultimate White Party 2014 (the fight).
25 The Ultimate White Party 2014 (the fight).
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A Butterfly in a Jar:
Where the Twirlers Lie
/ Christopher Braz
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pose for me and pose for me now stop...pussy, pussy, pussy,
pussy, pussy—you see this pussy? You want this pussy? Please,
“Now
you can’t afford this pussy.” Vogue—in terms of the pose, the
banter, and the walk; all work together to project the cunty realness in
feminist exaggerated freedoms. Cunty realness and its definitions lie at
two extremes.
One extreme being the grace of Glenda the good witch,
and the other channels the fierce clarity of Snow White's
Stepmother, The Evil Queen. We are at this intersection of
what it really means — the life, the fantasy, what you can
buy vs. what you can portray. This shit is real okay: “mind
you,” we vogue to survive. What happens to a butterfly
if you trap it in a jar? [she dies] But release her and she
will develop. Voguing is more then the appropriation of
queer culture by mainstream white pop artist. It is a way
to release your aggregation. Voguing makes you focus
your frustration and can help you to feel empowered.
The experience voguing creates is different for everyone.
For some the glamor and validation you get from voguing
is enough, but for others the pathos runs deep. When
you are called to vogue by the force of the music
or 'whatever have you' my dear, it is like no other
feeling you have ever felt. In the mist of voguing it is
like you are talking to God and he/she or it is telling
you work my queer child of the night — it is okay for
you to exist. I think so many are in search of this
divine right to exist, because you want the world to
hear you. However, is it better to be seen then heard?
To be honest a bitch can talk all day, but will you listen?
But if you see me, if you really see me then fuck a trance
state of mind. No I want you to be present in all of your
consciousness to witness my true form: now that is vogue!
The ridiculous endurance it takes to be queer matches
the endurance and utter indulgence in queer dance.
Vogue battles are not at 7:30pm Fridays and Saturdays on
stage like concert dance. “Child,” a true vogue performance
lives and breathes at 3am in the morning. The average
audience only gets a glimpse of vogue dancing every
now and then. That glimpse serves as a weave of vanity
into a mirror of self-reflection. There is no such thing
as losing yourself because you only have yourself
to gain. Has that not been the struggle all along? The
modern second-class citizen and subculture of a capitalist
market, it is not our turn to gain and gain again? If I
was not drunk writing this I would not be telling you
the whole truth but here it is! We are your children, stop
portraying queer culture/dance like it is a wild animal
at the zoo, because one day we are going to bite
your ass back. [The point in which I passed out —
after attending a mini-ball.]
All images courtesy of the writer
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Where have the twirlers gone? Voguing came from the
streets and the best shit happens there. When I was
younger in Detroit, I remember everything I knew about
voguing and all things queer I learned at Palmer Park. I
learned how to flirt, I met my first summer love, and I
watched fierce voguing. My encounters at Palmer Park
are 10 years old, the last time I went was about 4 years
ago and it felt completely different. Palmer Park was
still queer, but infected with the onset plaque of drill
team ultra-assimilation called “J-setting”; a dance form
the children have created and I care not to promote. I
was baffled, because the natural occurring homosexual
vogue artist at its finest, lives in the shade of the night at
a dimly lit Palmer Park. Maybe I went on a bad night but
the memories of street battles remain. One of my oldest
memories is actually from my mother. She always talks
about Detroit's Boston Bar in the 1970s. Boston Bar was
famous for the flawless drag queens and a little police
brutality as well. I always loved how drag queens were
such great spoke models within the queer community.
Drag Queens make you laugh, dream and they facilitate
a quality standard of queer performance. I have been
exploring what I like to call vogue expressionism. For me
vogue expressionism is an intersection of where voguing
meets drag and performance art. Vogue expressionism
lives throughout the entire show. It is the attitude, the
movement sequencing and the embodied force of the
queer male individual. Currently I am working with
Drag Performance Artist Violet Elixir (James Gardella)
in his piece Glitter Fabulous for the HOT Festival's
Annual Celebration of Queer Culture at Dixon Place
on the Lower East Side in New York City. I have noticed
the media's fixation on both voguing and men in drag
— not to take away from the movement of female drag
queens performing amazing work; however there is
something utterly fascinating about the performance
art of drag and its facilitation of vogue. If vogue is to
survive beyond the street lights of city parks and dark
corridors then let it be protected and further evolved.
We must keep pushing ourselves because it is up to us to
set the standard of quality for queer performance. ■
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Drawings
/ Ralph Lemon
All works from the artist's sketchbook, courtesy of Ralph Lemon.
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Infinite Work:
A Selection of
Writings by
Biba Bell
/ Matthew Piper
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
I'm glad, in retrospect, that my first encounter with Biba
Bell's dancing happened (almost) by chance. It was 2009.
She was in Detroit with MGM Grand, the collaborative
touring trio she'd co-founded four years earlier, performing a
site-specific dance called Royce. I'd found out about it simply
by being, as the saying goes, in the right place at the right time:
in a cafe, writing. I've forgotten now exactly what they said,
but certain words in the conversation of the couple next to me
caught my ear: "dance," almost certainly; "Modern Garage
Movement," maybe? "Really intimate?" "Really weird?" It was
enough, anyway, to give me what I needed to perform a search,
find the details, and show up that evening at the 555 Gallery's
then-home in a 7,000 square foot warehouse in southwest Detroit
— ready, perhaps, for anything, and certain of very little.
I say "almost" by chance, because I should confess to a vivid if
armchair enthusiasm for dance, a curious condition here in this
working class town (I credit the transformative experience of
being dragged to a late-career Merce Cunningham concert by a
canny college friend), without which those now-forgotten words
would likely have gone unheard, or at least unconsummated.
So yes, I'll say it was a potent admixture of accident and intention
that led me up a creaking staircase and into an expansive, wellworn
room, where I joined a handful of other audience members
and three unassuming dancers who disarmed us with friendly
banter as they prepared to perform their beautiful, terrible
dance. (Imagine a work of elegance, discomfort, whimsy, filth and
fury, all set to the sounds of increasingly labored breathing and
the unforgiving impact of bodies on wood floors.) Appropriate,
I think, because while the work of Biba Bell is profoundly
intentional, conceived with great purpose and meticulously
choreographed, it nevertheless depends on the incidental, the
unexpected — on the fruitful intervention of chaos into order.
* * *
The work of contemporary dance, according to Laurence
Louppe in her Poetics of Contemporary Dance, is, in part, to
reveal the "limitless textuality" of the body. 1 In the presence of
Biba Bell dancing, with her self-described inclination toward
"disorganized and awkward body states," we glimpse what
Louppe calls the "eruption of the unseen from out of its corporeal
limbo." As I learned that night at the 555 Gallery, and from the
eight or nine dances I've seen her perform in Detroit since, Bell's
sometimes ferocious but always carefully controlled physical
eloquence is at once immediate and reverberative; multitudinous,
contradictory impressions and associations are unlocked for the
observer by a gesture, a look, a step, a cry. I have also learned that
the textual and expressive richness of Bell's dancing is amplified
by that crucial but less controllable dimension of her work: the
unusual places in which it transpires. Her performances are
frequently staged outside of traditional venues, "in the world,"
as she puts it in the Fall/Winter 2009 - 2010 issue of Under the
Influence, "in contaminated spaces that are not roped off and
are without marley floors."
But Bell's eloquence, as we can see, is neither limited to her body
nor the curious spaces it inhabits. As choreographer, scholar,
director, and curator, she does not suffer from "the dancer's
distaste for language" that Jacqueline Lesschaeve invokes in
her book-length interview with Merce Cunningham. 2 Bell is,
in fact, voluble, as at home in language as she is in her body.
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As a writer and interlocutor, she is engaged in a spirited, ongoing
conversation that illuminates the evolving terms of her practice,
the contours of her research, and the many fertile nodes at which
the two intersect. I consider myself fortunate, in the years since
my revelatory encounter with Royce, to have participated in
the discourse surrounding Bell's work as a writer, enthusiast,
dialogist, and friend, and it is with great pleasure that I present
the selection of essays and interviews collected here. In them,
we trace the artist's path from northern California to New York
to Detroit, and we watch as her professional concerns - among
them, dance's "promiscuity" and "labor," its relationship to
domesticity, and the effects of time and place on performance,
and of performance on time and place - are elucidated.
The first selection is one of the most recent. "Notes on Dancing
in Detroit," originally published in the Spring 2014 issue of
Movement Research Journal, finds the native Californian deep
into her choreographic engagement with the city of Detroit,
preparing for It Never Really Happened, the dance she would
later perform in her mid-century Mies van der Rohe apartment
here. Punctuated by quotations from some of her key scholarly
influences, this brief work is marked by an elliptical style - "A
system of extreme introversion, this is also a new type of labor. I
started buying wigs" - in which the political and social slide into
the subjective. By way of her astute, concisely rendered insights
into Detroit, where "the houses are resting and the trees are
growing," we are also introduced to two of Bell's most pressing
recent concerns: the relationship of performance to time ("This
is a city haunted by speed") and work ("Labor unions had all but
vacated and dancers were few").
The next selection, "Curating a Collision," is an excerpt from
a curatorial statement published in conjunction with the 2008
Mission Creek Music Festival in San Francisco. It introduces
Bell's inclination toward conceptual collision and "disjunction,"
toward the orchestration of experimental ventures that, in
crossing disciplinary boundaries, "undo the autonomy of one
piece, idea, form or event," as she puts it. We begin to see clearly
her desire to advance the medium of dance by de-familiarizing
it via interdisciplinary engagement and play, a (dis)-organizing
tendency that clearly influences much of her work (including her
curatorial efforts here in Detroit Research). "As the recognizable
transgresses its discrete medium," she writes, "it collides with
other forms, genres, and even bodies in an escapade that expands
its limits and opens up the preordained boundaries of the field."
An excerpt from "MGM," an interview with Bell by Leanne Rae
Wierzba from the "Detroit issue" of Under the Influence, finds
her in the midst of the MGM Grand residency that brought Royce
to Detroit. In it, she articulates her concern with taking dance
outside of traditional performance venues and moving it into the
wider world ("I worry that dance is inaccessible"), and speaks
with early sensitivity and insight about Detroit, the hulking
but graceful partner whose peculiar gravity has begun to exert
a powerful influence on her thinking and work.
Bell is revealed to be an artful critic, an insightful explicator of
others' work, and a writer with a keen descriptive ability in the
next piece, an excerpt from "Slow Work: Dance's temporal effect
in the visual sphere," originally published in the Spring 2014 issue
of Performance Research Journal. In it, she uses an evocative
description of her performance in Maria Hassabi's The Ladies,
first performed in 2011, as a springboard to pose questions
about time, labor, and economics in dance as it "expands or
moves out or alongside its proper institutional contexts." In
asking these questions, Bell is laying the foundation for her own
theory about dance's role in "object-based economies," and its
so-called "domestic temporalities," which, she notes, "are most
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
notably expressed through its fleeting acts of disappearance and
resistance to the archive."
I had the opportunity to talk to Bell in more detail about dance
and the domestic in the final selection, "'How It Happened'
Revisited," an interview that we adapted from a longer piece
originally published in the Detroit web journal Infinite Mile.
The occasion for our talk was It Never Really Happened, the 2015
dance she performed for six nights in her mid-century apartment
here. (A video of this work is available on the website of Detroit
Research.) Over the course of our conversation, she discusses
this remarkable piece and its place within her practice in some
depth, exploring varieties of modernism and women's labor &
representation therein, the performativity of domesticity, and
the (de)-familiarizing, democratizing quality of the "social"
that continues to occupy such a central position in her work.
* * *
/On Dance
"To be a dancer," Laurence Louppe writes, "is to choose the body
and its movement as one's relational field, as one's instrument of
knowledge, thought and expression . [But] the corporal material,
'the carcass' as Jerome Andrews called it, is complex, difficult
to know and to integrate into a global awareness of the self.
Dance requires infinite work in order to move forward in this
awareness." I wrote before that Detroit is a working town. Little
wonder, then, that Biba Bell, a self-described laborer in the field
of performance, has chosen it as her adopted home. It is clear
from this small collection of her writings and interviews that
Bell is engaged in an ambitious, singular, and wide-ranging
effort to know and express the world through the body, moving in
space(s), and that her own infinite work continues to unfold, both
in body and in print, with surprise, grace, subtlety, and power.
116/117
DetroitResearch /On Dance
Notes on Dancing in Detroit
Movement Research Journal, Spring 2014
“…unless she could step away from the assembly line of her
own temporality and simply stop.”
-Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 3
After a decade in New York City I moved to Detroit. It was a change
of pace. Temporality is an important element here; this is a city
haunted by speed. When I first arrived in Detroit I sat for hours at
the window of a deli in the Eastern Market drinking in the view
of its farmers’ market sheds and parking lots, weather stained
storefronts, speckles of cars and people on a weekday afternoon.
Outside was a dusty palate, but not in a desert, Western kind of
way. Rather, the flashback of sepia-toned 1970s film emerging
across the face of the image, a patina of slow-moving seasons.
My curious maneuver had brought me headlong into the arms
of an urban scape that left its (historical) heart on its sleeve.
Labor unions had all but vacated and dancers were few. I began
a reflective movement considering my own artistic formation,
my training, technique, and embodied discipline. In short, my
many years spent upon dance’s own (factory) floor.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have a studio. I’m just a kitchen-table
artist.”
-Felix Gonzales-Torres 4
This moment was also my entrance into the domestic. It included
buying a house, not for the Detroit dream of $500 but close, for
the price of a car. Slowly, precociously, my studio grew waywardly
around me - piles of books line the walls, dog runs and late night
disco and funk at the bar. Ambling vines grow up the glass dome
walls of the brilliant flower conservatory on Belle Isle. I once
walked in, felt the hum of the oxygen against my body and skin,
and sealed the deal. It is a topic vision of what happens when one is
left to one’s own devices. A system of extreme introversion, this is
also a new type of labor. I started buying wigs. I wondered: Where
does domesticity fit into a city populated by factory relics and
the memories (and trauma) of modernity’s ferocity? Where does
my studio practice fall within this economy? I rented a loft-like
room in an old auto-body manufacturing plant after falling madly
in love with a hulking theater-cum-parking garage downtown.
The coupling seemed natural: dancing and driving (parking?).
The romance momentarily fell apart so I tried another route. My
studio became the 5th floor apartment of a Mies van der Rohe
high rise. Sepia tones transition into elegant greige. The living
room, as Benjamin says, “is a box in the theater of the world.”
Walls of glass frame the room within which my well developed
sense of placing my body on display wakes up each morning, less
than groggy, to warm up with a cup of coffee.
“The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of
which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole
in which it is always already included.”
-Agamben 5
I have always loved dancing an adagio, I don’t know why. I tell my
students that its goal is to slow down time. Though sometimes
at home there is a different kind of manic energy. Dancing
it out means laughing, sobbing, fucking, cooking, talking,
thinking, cleaning…spending time together. Drive around and
you immediately see, the houses are resting and the trees are
growing — a state of emergency? Detroit confronts me with the
paradox of membership, where the relation between inside and
outside, or strangeness and intimacy, is complicated. It shuffles
the didactic potential of (a) work. Every year a new version of
“the hustle” is born. At this point, I can dance four.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
Marianne Brass and Biba Bell, The Bells, choreography Biba Bell, 2011.
Photo: Michelle Andonian. Image courtesy of the artist.
118/119
DetroitResearch /On Dance
Curating a Collision
Dancers Group, 7/1/08
“It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and
the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously
determine the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience.”
— Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics 6
What are the terms of art making? What are the terms of
its presentation, performance and reception? What are the
terms of space as a frame? What is at stake in the alteration or
manipulation of any one of these components? The terms of in/
visibility in the field of dance have interested me for some time
now. Traversing through the roles of performer, dance-maker,
scholar, curator and general beholder, I have been filled with
experiences, concerns and questions surrounding the centrality
of genre in the arts. And I can’t help but wonder what in fact are
the terms of the definitions of these roles. Curatorial practice
requires the organizing tendencies wherein artistic work is
brought into multiple contexts and exposures. How does this
also determine its potential scope of experience? What happens
when a form begins to move outside of its familiar terrain? What
happens when a dancer refuses to move, a musician to make
My questions trace out the limits of curatorial process and
are certainly not new — the traditions of the avant-garde offer
representative answers — though these questions may (must?)
still be asked by artists, curators, critics and even the average
(if one could exist) audience member. The quote [in the epigraph
above] from Jacques Rancière’s book The Politics of Aesthetics
has continued to echo through my mind, exposing the effects
of the curatorial process, which in itself harkens to another
level of collision, often one that remains partially hidden.
Rancière articulates the political front of art as industry which
is perpetually intertwining with practices of social engagement
and sensorial experience. Collision has been an opportunity
for me to consider curatorial process and my own engagement
with/in this role. For the curator moves as a liaison between
performers and audiences, works and their effects, straddling
interests, markets, trends and personal affinities. Rancière states
the components that organize artistic work in its larger field of
circulation and reception, and in this project I’ve focused on the
term “collision” itself as an equally present characteristic in this
process of delimitation. Collision operates as a metaphor and
indicates the performative dimensions of aesthetic experience.
This collision is one that acts as a nexus of circuits moving
between dance, performance, relationality, community and
experience.
sound, a painter to determine his/her stroke?
* * *
It seems that I’ve been contemplating the terms of collision for
sometime: of dances, genres, bodies, descriptors, spaces, etc.
Collision as an instance of simultaneous transmission or, more
specifically in MCMF [Mission Creek Music Festival], a platform
for performance which could bring forth alternate genres. A
possible opening for dance to be brought into an expanded field
by means of its interaction, encounter or impact within the
structure of the larger music festival event.
The role of the curator varies in sway and substantiality
depending on the field (visual, performing and media arts,
music, etc.). His/hers may be a prominent position signifying
the tastes of a particular institution/organization or be an
artist creating a show of friend/colleague’s work. Though these
decisions may reflect who does and who does not get funded,
presented or produced, they often happen behind closed doors.
The curator operates in a nexus point between art and access,
expression and the languages which form to it, surround it or
pass right on through. The curator molds, modulates or tempers
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
flows of artistic work, culls at potentials for artistic movements,
moments or trends. He/she places together disparate work and
creates connections, frictions, dialogues or comparisons that
must always be negotiated as a collision of sorts, undoing the
autonomy of any one piece, idea, form or event. To consider
such indeterminate measures is a significant responsibility
of curatorial choice, one that does not simply entail degrees of
similarity or difference, form or content.
Collision is a curatorial venture that may fray in its center or
edges, through both disjunction and alignment, whose pieces
extend past, yet are brought together in one particular site,
on one particular weekend. Collision provides an exciting
opportunity to explore the exchanges that might generate
from its impacts and invite artists to engage with the space,
time and contextual constraints differing from the norms of
the proscenium. It deals with potentials which range within
and beyond the discretion of singular works, and lets pieces
synchronize or create friction in their processes of mutual
contextualization. As the recognizable transgresses its discrete
medium it collides with other forms, genres, and even bodies, in
an escapade that expands its limits and opens up the preordained
boundaries of the field. Interdisciplinary is an equanimous word
that reconciles the aggressive potential of such a confrontational
scheme, but how might one dwell within or observe the interstice
prior to categorization? Is there a certain rawness to the force of
a collision? What might dance look like if it doesn’t yet look like
dance? These are all questions I returned to repeatedly while
working to curate Collision.
/On Dance
120/121
DetroitResearch /On Dance
MGM
Passages from Leanne Rae Wierzba, “MGM,” Under the
Influence: The Detroit Issue, Fall/Winter 2009 – 2010
"...Garages are dirty, industrial feeling, smelly. It is uncomfortable
to leave the studio for such a gnarly place, but the lure of dancing
in the midst of the grit is very tempting - the oil slicks to the skin,
hair mops up dust and debris, and its crevices hold arresting
scents which momentarily eclipse choreographic recollection.
Our bodies, breath, sweat, flesh and movement phrases visually
contrast with the actions normally performed in this space."
* * *
"As an artist I'm driven to dance in the world, so to speak - in
contaminated spaces that are not roped off and are without marley
floors. This can be problematic and risky, yet it is mandatory to
test these borders. I worry that dance is inaccessible. It is not
contributing to artist and cultural discourses as much as it could.
For me the most inaccessible thing about contemporary dance
is its adherence to and dependence upon the proscenium. And
if I could suggest an attractive trajectory forward it would be its
growth outside of the black box."
* * *
"We are dancers who have had extensive training in classical
ballet and contemporary techniques, and spent many years of
and informed by what these environments physically permit.
To tour a choreography that could easily be produced for the
theater in such contrasting, distinct, and unconventional places
was exciting in that it pushed us to engage with our bodies, the
dance, the audience, and the site in a highly improvisational
manner. We became alert to the dance's fluctuating form and
were really affected by the land and cityscapes through which
we were traveling."
* * *
"I have spoken to a number of people who liken Detroit to a type
of frontier. I think they mean that that city represents a kind of
possibility, a beginning, and while it is true in certain ways — the
properties are cheap, the industry has virtually disappeared, the
city is entirely under-populated — this city is filled, brimming
with absence and history. It is not empty, blank or a tabula rasa
by any means. Spatially and visually the city is very layered, and
it evokes a similar phenomenon on the temporal dimension. The
histories, memories and events that comprise this place are still
echoing particular resonances, changing frequencies through
time and its new developments. It feels like there are objects,
bodies and stories buried all over this place, abandoned cars,
boats, clothes, appliances, letters, photographs, work gloves,
flowers and graffiti that exhaustively dust its surfaces….There
is a quiet listening process that Detroit requires. Its monuments
are constantly threatening invisibility."
our lives in the studio and theater. Our dancing has been sculpted
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
Biba Bell, Royce, choreography: Biba Bell, MGM Grand, Detroit, 2009. Photo by Garrett MacLean courtesy of the artist
122/123
DetroitResearch /On Dance
The Ladies, choreography: Maria Hassabi, New York City, 2012. Photo by Francis Coy courtesy of the artist
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
SLOW WORK: Dance's temporal effect in
the visual sphere
Performance Research Journal, 7/4/14
In the autumn of 2011 I began working with New York-based
choreographer Maria Hassabi on The Ladies, a series of
‘appearances’ that involved pairs of dancers taking to the
streets of Manhattan to perform two-hour long intervals of
varied choreographic scores that included walking, pausing,
posing, looking and being looked at. The six-week span of public
performances took place unannounced after a limited rehearsal
period in Hassabi’s home studio. An education of stillness and
slowness, we were briefed in the rigorous labour of composure,
choreographic pursuit. Referencing famous and affective poses,
she has spent years grafting them on to her own and dancer
Hristoula Harakas’s bodies, developing an intensive performance
quality at a signature “glacially slow” pace that eclipses its
confounding effort. 8 Bodily endurance, without becoming
“endurance art,” initiates a strategy that makes visible the “effort
of formation,” intervening against the composure of its image. 9
The work can be approached with curiosity or restlessness,
intrigue or anxiety, and it is up to the audience to decide. The
question of why (pose) collapses into how, anticipating a formal
pursuit that is, as Paul Virilio suggests, “a technical pursuit of
time.” 10
using movement to not only locate ourselves in space but in time,
producing an extended temporal plane upon which our dancing
would occur. The project truly was, in the words of post-studio
artist Carl Andre, a movement out onto the streets, 7 where its
temporal consistency dynamically inserted it against the grain
of urban hustle. A range of reactions from passers-by ensued:
disinterest and inattentiveness, curiosity and enjoyment,
interjection and suspicion (especially during two excursions
entering the galleries of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in
New York that threatened with the risk of expulsion), mockery
and ridicule and even one case of assault.
The Ladies was my entre into Hassabi’s process as a performer
and participant. Through my own labour within its technical
demands, I was able to garner a sense of the corporeal capacity
of dance to intervene within temporal regimes, accumulate and
inflect their flow, and produce its own sense of time. The overarching
task of her choreographic structures for this project could
be as simple as travelling two avenue blocks when, after one and
a half hours, I would realize that only one-quarter of the distance
had been covered. Each step, gesture or glance was isolated,
metabolized and extended. A quickening of bodily systems
emerged – circulatory, respiratory, muscular, the hum of the
/On Dance
Citing the figure of painting, sculpture, cinema and fashion,
Hassabi’s work morphs the pose, attenuated to its historiographic
spectacle. Engaging duration, proximity and distance, the
technical elements of lighting (its objects, illumination and
heat), costume and the architectural context of the theater or
gallery, her work asserts the action of posing as a demanding,
nervous system – recalling John Cage’s observations regarding
silence within the sensory deprivation chamber, or Steve Paxton’s
attention to stillness complicated by a bodily persistence to shift
and waver in The Small Dance, The Stand. The energy required
to maintain intensive deceleration in the midst of New York
City’s busy, populated streets exaggerated interior calibrations
of creaking joints, aching legs, trembling muscles, adjustments
124/125
DetroitResearch /On Dance
in weight and breath and pulse, and the waxing and waning of
focus. My body’s capacity to filter surrounding stimuli – roaring
vehicles, random pedestrians, even the procession of an Occupy
Wall Street march – afforded incremental complexity to the
spare, yet exhausting, choreography. I exert effort in order to
locate my body in the momentary lapse of each pose. Intervals
are produced. Hassabi’s piece offered a prolonged meditation on
what we as dancers do while amplifying the urgency of my own
questions within current discussions pertaining to the popularity
of dance within visual art spheres: what is the work of dance (as
it expands or moves out or alongside its proper institutional
contexts)? Does performance practice expand or contract
temporality as a primary intervention within object-based
economies and institutional structures? How may dance perform
this labour? Deceleration, set in relation to performance’s
economy of ephemerality, draws attention to contemporary
dance’s relationship to labour, production and (im)materiality.
It affords questions about how economies are articulated on
and against what I would argue are dance’s primary, domestic
temporalities, which are most notably expressed through its
fleeting acts of disappearance and resistance to the archive.
As dance navigates modernism’s disciplinary and spatial
distributions (between studio and street, labour and leisure,
visual and performing arts) this practice of stilling slowness
invests the temporal as a site of corporeal labor while also
implementing time as a mode of both critique and traversal.
the politics of forgetting and exposing “the potential violence
that underwrites the domesticated household.” 12 Titled “Domus
and the Megalopolis,” Lyotard discusses the domus as a site
of domestication. It controls space and time through custom,
rhythms of birth and death and communities of work and is
maintained as a “mode of space, time and body under the regime
(of) nature.” 13 The common work is the domus itself, in other
words the community. It is the work of a repeated domestication.
Custom domesticates time, including the time of incidents and
accidents, and also space, even the border regions. Memory is
inscribed not only in narratives, but in gestures, in the body’s
mannerisms. And the narratives are like gestures, related to
gestures, places, proper names. 14 Representing “[c]ommon
time, common sense, common place,” the domus houses
the body’s gestures, habits and customs as a keystone of its
foundation. 15 “Common work” exposes ways in which temporal
qualities of speed, duration, and rhythm contribute to the
affective architecture of the domestic that binds body and site
and maintains it as a space of (re)production. As the sanction
and nurturer of bodies, it demarcates the rhythms of these
bodies as they rise and fall, wake and sleep and move through
the world. This is a bucolic site, where the function of labour
and its temporality is naturalized, intersected by the fact that
such domesticity is also a sign of inherent violence. The domus
territorializes through forces of domestication, figuring the
self-perpetuated, embodied force of its social choreographies. 16
The rhythms of dance’s labour can be illuminated by Jean-
François Lyotard’s discussion of the domus and domestication
of time. In a 1987 conference paper, Lyotard delivered a critique
of Martin Heidegger’s “philosophy of the soil,” 11 focusing on
The questions that Hassabi’s work ignited, pertaining to
assumptions of dance’s inherent temporality and the embodied
labour of slowness, were made all the more urgent after an
encounter with Studio Olafur Eliasson’s video piece, Movement
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Microscope, 2011. It was late November 2011, and I was setting a
piece at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris for the opening
of Danser Sa Vie, a large-scale exhibition tracing relationships
between dance and visual art in predominately North American
and European contexts during the twentieth- and into the
twenty-first century. All week I had been rehearsing in the
museum’s outdoor courtyard with a group of sixty dancers for
The Endless Pace, 2009, a collaborative project with visual artist
Davide Balula. The dance is designed as a clock, each dancer
performing the actions of the second and minute hands, keeping,
representing, and producing time. The conceptual overtones
of the dance connect with a spectacle that is reminiscent of
Busby Berkeley’s abstraction and serialism. My challenge and
desire from the clutches of modernity’s embodied legacies of
efficiency, Taylorism, or assembly-line mechanics, where each
movement might be reduced to a “mere marking of time.” 17
This success settled on facilitating a pleasurable spaciousness
within the strict relentlessness of the tick-tock, which I felt
was especially critical considering that the cast was comprised
solely of volunteer performers. I wanted the dancers to enjoy the
physicality of ma(r)king time….
/On Dance
126/127
DetroitResearch /On Dance
'How it Happened' Revisited
It Never Really Happened, choreography: Biba Bell, Detroit, 2015. Video still by Christine Hucal
Matthew Piper: Because so much of your work is staged "in the
world," outside of traditional venues, each piece is informed,
elaborated upon, or, as you say, complicated by the particular
place in which it is performed, as much as the places are enlivened
and complicated by the dancing. The site of your apartment
dance, a mid-century high rise apartment designed by Mies van
der Rohe in Detroit's Lafayette Park neighborhood, suggests a
threefold significance: its domestic character, its modernism,
its Detroit-specificity. Can you take some time to unpack how
these qualities of the site intersect with your research interests
and discuss how they situate the piece within your practice?
Biba Bell: Yes, It Never Really Happened has been developing
through a somewhat extensive research period. A few years ago
I was very interested in potential parallels between the body of
the dancer and the laborer through the lens of modernity and
specifically industry. In this sense, there were ways that the
choreographic processes of industrialized labor, exemplary to
Detroit in particular, could also be thought through histories of
dance and its aestheticization of the body, and the relationship
between the individual and ensemble. One of the first go to’s for
such an analogy might be the spectacular configurations, canons,
and abstractions of the dancer in Busby Berkeley films. Dance
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
scholar Mark Franko also discusses at length this relationship
between modern dance and labor in the early part of the 20th
Century, citing the New Deal-funded dance groups and the
mechanized chorus line represented by the Tiller Girls.
As someone who works from the premise of space — as place,
architecture, context, etc. — I was initially awed by the vast scale
of Detroit’s factories and theaters. The assembly line project
was in conversation with this. I mean, go to the Rouge Plant
and walk the catwalk, there is a forced perspective that begins
to emerge much like the conditions of theater, the lighting, the
rhythms and sound, the movements of the beholder aligning
with the progression of the moving floors and robots. The whole
space begins to open up and the building itself participates in
this choreographic world, contained within but at the same time
energized by, its architecture.
On the other hand, my move to Detroit, and this is perhaps
expressed in the “Notes on Dancing in Detroit” piece, really did
mark a personal shift toward the domestic. After many years in
New York City and San Francisco, I was involved in this desire to
buy a home, plant a garden, and focus on domestic partnership.
Within this context, I began to reconsider modernity from
a purely industrial standpoint and wondered, what about
the domestic sphere? What is the trajectory of the domestic
within this context and how might it be mutually constructed
(along with its embodied roles, affective economies, design
aesthetics)? Beatriz Colomina writes at length about modernist
architecture’s (and here we have Mies, the Eames couple, Le
Corb, Johnson, even Bucky Fuller!) relationship to industrial
and manufacturer economies but also its relationship to war.
(In fact, It Never Really Happened was initially proposed to
take place in Fuller’s Dymaxion Home in the Ford Museum.)
The home as a “shockabsorber” antidote to atomic threat. We
know Ford was involved in wartime ventures, and then, after
all, Detroit is a city of homes.
In terms of the domestic, it is a space that cultivates the
individual. It produces subjects as much as the public sphere.
But it also is, within its modernism, highly gendered and the site
of reproductive, affective economies. A kind of education takes
place in the body, the psyche, the day to day rhythms of day and
night, eating, sleeping, making love, etc. But this modernism, in
an architectural sense, is also a space that (almost cinematically)
frames the body — specifically, in the first iteration of my piece
in the Mies apartment, the female body. This is also the dancer's
body, a figure at home in the theater of the world (to cite Walter
Benjamin). I repeatedly return to the writings of Colomina
throughout this process: “She controls the interior, yet she is
trapped within it.”
For me, the domestic space is easily coupled with the space of the
studio. I’ve written about the studio in the first issue of Detroit
Research, in relationship to the conservatory on Belle Isle. I
came up in classical ballet from a very young age and the growth
and the development of my body and sense of self have been in
relationship to a viewing public, positioned towards a gaze. In
dance you often have a wall of mirrors in the studio as a reminder
of the viewer, who not only resides as an absent yet incessant
audience but also provides a second perspective for the dancer,
trained to be simultaneously both in and outside of herself. This
double perspective is a rigorous and particular training. It is
/On Dance
128/129
DetroitResearch /On Dance
It Never Really Happened, choreography: Biba Bell, Detroit, 2015. Photo by Christine Hucal
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/On Dance
It Never Really Happened, choreography: Biba Bell, Detroit, 2015. Video still by Christine Hucal
130/131
DetroitResearch /On Dance
about growing up with a highly particular relationship to the
gaze. No wonder there are so many female dancers! When I first
walked into the Mies apartment I was floored by the panoramic
view (which includes both sunrise and sunset, Lafayette Park,
Eastern Market and its steeples, and Ford Field) and, at the same
time, its extreme level of exposure.
The apartment transposes the two spaces, the space of the home
and the space of the studio or the stage, and that, ultimately, is
one of the most beautiful things about it. The kind of modernism
of it, the discussion or the discourse around that moment in
architecture, where Le Corbusier becomes the vocalist in
terms of his five tenets of architecture. Part of that is the
home as "a machine for living," the efficiency of movement,
the modalities of pathways, of being able to get from point A to
point B, that architecture (or dance) would necessarily include
the seamlessness of point A to B. But that’s an old conversation,
and we can have new conversations more along the lines of cross
programming: Bernard Tschumi talking about a rotunda being
turned into a swimming pool, for instance….
In Detroit, I think the pinnacle of such an example would be
Henry Ford’s early workshop which was later the grounds upon
which the Michigan Theatre was built, the largest theatre of its
kind in 1925, and then all of its different incarnations, a music
venue or the porn theatre, which was then being boxed up and
turned into a parking garage! Oh my goodness, that’s quite
a passage for a building and its function. And so that really
interests me. And these movements, these transformations
are also theatrical. The Corbusier notion of efficiency is a
social construct, just as the notion that the theatre is a space to
perform things. Architecture is its own actor.
It’s a domesticated experience, of the senses, the bodies,
the rhythms, all of that. I’ve discussed this phenomenon in
relation to Jean-François Lyotard’s writing on the domus. The
dancer’s relationship to choreography and technique often
evolves through a highly developed experience of relentlessly
repeating movements or processes. Complexities of the body
are learned through the meticulous investigation of the body,
its desires, possible pathways and trajectories. Dance erupts
out of the familiarity of a habitual movement or routine—out of
something practiced daily, like a walk through revolving door or
the mounting of a flight of stairs. Dance disrupts the attention to
the ordinary and brings it into the realm of the extraordinary.
The Mies apartment in Lafayette Park has been a great space
to work in and to be in. It’s been a sanctuary for me. After years
in New York, especially, where you spend so much time out on
the street, and where people would say, "God, everybody’s living
in these tiny places." Not everybody does, but one of the things
you realize when you go into someone’s apartment - which feels
like a privilege because you’re almost always meeting out - you
realize that it can be such a sanctuary. For me, that’s what this
apartment ultimately is. And I think this would be testament to
the success of this particular development, within Detroit and
within this specific urban context. The park, the trees, rabbits,
open sky - perhaps Detroit was able to truly manifest the utopic
environment these modernists had hoped to dream up.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
I’m happy to dance within this domestic environment, not
to propagate an incessant bliss, but to really invest in the
theatricality of these spaces.
MP: In "Slow Work," you write that Maria Hassabi's performances
cite the "figure" that is more conventionally associated with
painting, sculpture, cinema and fashion. I'm wondering if you
can talk more about the idea of the figure in dance as distinct from
the character or the movement-for-movement's-sake abstraction.
How did you incorporate the figure into your apartment dance?
What or who is that figure? And how does it relate to your
conception of the dancer/choreographer as visual artist?
BB: This notion of the female, domestic figure was very important
for me in the development of It Never Really Happened. This
figure is essential to modernism. This is the figure of a late
19th Century New Woman who integrates sport, fashion, and
Taylorized efficiency into the domestic day to day. Colomina
writes, “The house is installed before the site, not in the site.
The house is a frame for a view. The window is a gigantic screen.
But then the view enters the house, it is literally ‘inscribed’ in
the lease.” I feel like there is a similar predicament at play with
the figure. This is a figure that, as you mentioned, populates
visual art, painting, fashion, etc. The apartment operates as a
theatrical frame, and I feel it when I am in it. It is discursive.
And, ultimately, my dancing figure is in conversation with these
forms or disciplines. But this is also the figure of modern dance,
who is also fervently invested in the aesthetics of modernism.
She can be Martha [Graham], her dramatically stretched
lengths of dark jersey, or maybe Isadora [Duncan], billowing
and exalted, or Trisha [Brown], supple and fluid. This female
figure is mapped throughout Detroit too…. I think of Diana [Ross],
Aretha [Franklin], Grace Lee [Boggs]. These are not women
who stayed at home. This is the figure as artist, a singular force,
expressive and illuminating, within a culture of the many. The
dancer might curiously stand in as a site exemplar who dances
between the individual and the ensemble, disciplined and finetuned
yet challenging and untamed. She is at home in the house,
this is her house (“of the pelvic truth,” if we continue to work
the Martha reference) yet she also pushes against its walls,
cries from its balconies, frolics across its living room floors.
Many years ago I made a piece that sourced from Kubrick’s Eyes
Wide Shut, 1999, the argument scene between Tom and Nicole,
when they’re in their underwear smoking a joint and Nicole
confesses her desire for another man. For me, dance complicates
assumptions of fidelity. It is always already escaping its house,
theater, disciplinary regime, archive, etc. Dancing is perpetually
engaged in an act of stepping out.
Back to the figure…within the apartment, Mies’ architecture
produces the panoramic landscape as a picture, through the
frame of the windows. I reference this possibility in the final
section of It Never Really Happened, when I slowly walk around
the perimeter of the room while tracing the horizon across its
sweat-covered/steamy windows. The open, panoramic view
has become opaque, and through this gesture the landscape
transforms from the pictorial into the sculptural. I’m interested
in how the figure is produced through a coalescence of body and
/On Dance
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architectural interface; this figure who is also already inflected
by the gaze (art historical and theatrical).
MP: I'd like to talk about the cocktail party element of the
performance. Your invitation clearly instructs the audience to
be on time, but upon arriving, there are forty-five minutes or so
of, you could say, no performance. The hostess [played by Nicola
Kuperus] is making drinks, guests are chatting, and suddenly,
for a while, it's just a party and the dance performance recedes
- you could almost forget that it's going to happen. Later, I found
myself reflecting on what an integral part of the performance the
cocktail party was, and then considering the kind of domestic
performativity that such an occasion gives rise to (I'm thinking,
now, of the "affective architecture" of domesticity that you bring
up in “Slow Work.") There's a lot to talk about here, but I'm
wondering if you could start by relating the cocktail party to
your earlier work with MGM Grand (I remember, for instance,
in Royce, that the dance was briefly interrupted by an offering
of potato chips and beer), and then discuss its role in the piece.
What work is it performing?
and slightly odd. This is hard to do. Everything has been done
in the theater; everything has been accounted for. We would
try to work with what was there, to really be inside of it. For the
premiere of NUT at The Kitchen, a piece that we also performed
at the MOCAD in Detroit, we focused on small interventions:
talking to the audience in the lobby before the show, leaving
our costume changes and bags of warm-up clothes in the aisles
so everyone had to pass by and see this stuff, bringing people
up on the stage for an "intermission" (where they, again, could
eat Better Made chips and drink beer), and climbing over the
risers and audience in pointe shoes. But the flux that we are used
to encountering when dancing in more unconventional dance
environments is an exciting element that we don't think of as
outside of the work, it is a part of it, and the theater makes this
flux much more difficult to locate; maybe it is more micro. The
space doesn't shake us around, maybe it vibrates (especially with
all the electricity of the lights), but it’s hard to feel it sometimes.
The walls get hard, the floor feels stable, and the audience likes
to settle into the familiarity of the space and the spectacle. They
know how to be a good audience.
BB: The social element was integral to MGM (Modern
Garage Movement) and the tours. The development of MGM
was very much about touring, leaving NYC, which has been
widely considered the center for dance or performance in this
country, and venturing our work into other places. We would
perform anywhere, anytime. But also, when working in theaters
specifically, we would try to make the theater experience explicit
But MGM was always more interested in a venue that has no
backstage; we're just there. So, ultimately, it’s an event that
people are gathering for that we can turn into an evening. Even
for the first few tours, a big part of our show was having a speech
that would introduce the event, to signify the performance was
beginning and shift the context from the party or the gathering.
"Hi, we’re MGM, this is what we’re doing, this is how many
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
performances we’ve done, this is where we’ve been, now go
over there," that sort of thing. We always folded an audience
directive within the structure of the work. As dancers, we also
wanted to be guides.
Within the context of It Never Really Happened, the cocktail
party is crucial. For some reason dance performances are quite
punctual; it’s a different urgency or sense of beginning than
music shows or art openings, where there is always this idea that
things might start late or you can come or go or whatever. I really
wanted to alleviate the audience of this sense of expectation, but
I also wanted to accommodate folks that are not used to being
punctual for dance-specific events. I wanted there to be a way
that the public almost forgot why they were gathered, that they
became immersed in the cocktail party dimension - talking
and drinking, enjoying the view, allowing their day to recede,
opening up into the groove of the evening. I wanted them to
begin to feel at home in someone’s home. Easy and open. Once
people began to relax and talk to each other, then the dance
would begin unannounced. Everyone had a different sense of
this “beginning.”
slightly familiar. Whether she was a friend or not, she is her own
iconic figure and offers the public a mode of reference. Without a
huge amount of experimental dance work here, it is so necessary
to offer a way into the work. It’s not a conventional performance
situation. This was something that I really came to believe with
MGM… we very much wanted the audience to feel that they were
appreciated and involved. We immediately wanted to be gracious
hosts; we wanted them to feel at home.
/On Dance
This was Nicola’s role in the apartment piece, to help the audience,
to guide them into the space, to make them feel comfortable, sit
them down, organize them, help them feel that they’re in the
right place. And, whether the audience who showed up had any
relation to dance or not, Nicola (as a recognized, established
member of Detroit’s art and music communities) is already
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A Sketch of It Never Really Happened
(Part One)
Matthew Piper, Infinite Mile, No. 16, April 2015
movement is floor-bound: she expands (makes lines, planes) and
contracts (makes a ball); she binds, contorts, and slow-motion
flips. On her knees, torso perpendicular to the floor, arms erect,
she makes a kind of Tetris shape, all planes, and then slaps her
Upon arriving to the fifth floor corner apartment, audience
members are greeted warmly by the hostess, who welcomes us,
takes our coats and immediately gets to work making cocktails
in the galley kitchen. We enter, chatting with the hostess or
getting our bearings in the living room, which has two window
hands hard against the floor. Frantic rubbing of the carpet,
faster, making circles, then she's on her knees, ascending as
her breath quickens. She makes more lines, planes, this time
upright, only again to descend, lying in unlikely repose on the
corner of the east wall's heating & cooling box.
walls (facing north and east) and two interior walls lined with
benches. Underneath the benches on the south wall are stacks
and stacks of books. There is a small, hemispherical fire pit
atop the heating & cooling box at the north window wall, flames
flickering inside, and near it, a single black Wassily chair. Along
the east window wall are speakers and a small stereo, as well as
a collection of seashells on the short ledge.
Rising again, she stays in place, crouching and making circles
with her arms (her bones and the bones of the building both
creak), leading to virtuosa moments of leaping, pirouetting
velocity as the music quickens. But when it turns unsettling,
disturbing, a slow splits returns her to the floor, then a sense
of collapse, of horror, and when she stands again she makes a
sobbing gesture, hands over face, which becomes a rapid nasal
We chat, drink, take our seats and enjoy the view for half an hour
or forty-five minutes as more guests arrive: getting to know each
breath, a panic, as she stalks through the room. Then a 1960s
pop song starts and everything breaks.
other or catching up, talking about the performance or other
things. The hostess enters the living room and turns on the
stereo: the music alternates between sly and creeping, driving
and portentous, and it mostly quiets the room.
She flees; the sound of water being turned on, left gushing in
the bath. She and the hostess wheel in a fern and turn on a stage
light that illuminates the fern, the ceiling, the north wall. There
is no music as Biba seems to move the hostess about the room
In sneaks Biba, in fragments, a hand on the wall that divides the
living room from the kitchen, turns her head in a long arc as she
gazes out the windows. She's wearing a grey, mushroom-cut wig
and a stretchy, mocha colored tube dress.
by dancing around her, close. The water keeps running and the
windows fog as the hostess is led to the heating & cooling box,
upon which she sits, staring at the floor. Biba, manic, rhythmic,
traverses the length of the kitchen while the hostess sits, stares,
sighs. Rolling piano music as Biba enters the living room again,
The sun is setting and the light is reddening. The movement is
slow, graceful, architectural. She approaches a column in the
corner of the room and arches her body against it, making a
curve to a straight line. The music is tender and slow; three tones
serene, and begins the final gesture: a long, slow tracing along
the room's four walls with her fingers: stepping carefully, coming
very close to us, arm outstretched, making lines in wide, steamy
windows and just ab0ve our heads. ■
descend and repeat against a soundscape backdrop. Now the
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
1 Cf. Laurence Louppe, Poetics of Contemporary Dance (Alton,
Hampshire: Dance Books , 2010).
2 Cf. Jacqueline Lesschaeve, The Dancer and the Dance: Merce
Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve (London
and New York: Marion Boyars, 1991).
3 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003).
4 Felix Gonzales-Torres quoted by David Reed, in The Studio Reader:
On The Space of Artists, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 119. .
5 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 24-25.
6 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rochill
(London: Continuum, 2004).
7 Cf. Barbara Rose, “Carl Andre,” 2013, www.interviewmagazine.com.
Accessed 18 June 2013.
8 Cf. Claire Bishop, “Now you see it,” Artforum (September 2013): 319.
9 Cf. Scott Lyall, program notes for Maria Hassabi’s Premiere, 2013, at
The Kitchen, New York City, New York.
10 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetic Disappearance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2009), 24.
/On Dance
11 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 270.
12 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 270.
13 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 191-192.
14 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 193.
15 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 191.
16 Cf. Hewitt, Social Choreography (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005).
17 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
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2 /Research
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BLUES & ROOTS:
FR AGMENT OF A HISTORY
OF THE DETROIT A RTISTS
WORKSHOP 1
/GEORGE TYSH / ALL PHOTOS BY LENI SINCLAIR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
“No matter what becomes of it, art is local, local to a place and to
a person, or group of persons... It happens somewhere, not everywhere.”
— Robert Creeley
“Why Bother?" 2
The Detroit Artists Workshop, an early instance of
what's now called social practice, didn't come out of
nowhere. In summer 1964, its young architects drew
on ideas that were certainly in the mid-century air, but had
been around much longer: from the Paris Commune of 1871 (the
first workers government ever created), to the September 1936
formation in Detroit of UAW local 174 (the fledgling union that
would soon take on the whole auto industry), to the 1957 birth in
Europe of the Situationist International (a neo-Marxist group
that emphasized the centrality of real-life activities endlessly
experimenting and correcting themselves). While perhaps a few
of us knew this history, all of us were keenly aware of the Civil
Rights struggle, the Ban the Bomb protests, and the poetry-andjazz
phenomenon known as the Beat Generation. And the fact
that poetry, jazz, and the other arts were terrifically intriguing
in and of themselves was precisely the point.
By 1960, a watershed for the arts in America, modernist
innovators Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk,
Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg
had achieved critical acclaim and commercial success. Beat
authors Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs,
who had won legal battles against police censorship, were
household names. And creative ferment began to spread
across the country. In a sign of the times, proto-Pop iconoclast
Rauschenberg collaborated with composer John Cage on works
for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And 1961 saw
the release of Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the
Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, followed in 1962 by John
Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard — recordings that
shattered preconceptions about jazz as popular entertainment,
unleashed a tide of experimentation, and stood as emblems of
creative group dynamics.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
DC5 (Detroit Contemporary 5), Danny Spencer, John Dana, Larry Nozero, Cherles Moore, and Ron English at The Artists Workshop 1965.
/ Research
As if presciently, the summer 1963 issue of Kulchur — an avantgarde
quarterly edited by poets LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka),
Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Diane di Prima, et al — featured,
among others: George Oppen's The Mind's Own Place (in which
he exhorts poets "to listen, to hear evidence, to consider what
indeed we have brought forth upon this continent."); Louis
Zukofsky's A Statement for Poetry (wherein he writes of the
"musical horizon of poetry" and the idea that "so-called pure
music may be literary in a communicative sense"); and Larry
Eigner's Walls Dispose a City (his analysis of Gertrude Stein
that affirms, "The milieu is carried by the language [style],
which is always there..."). 3 To my rapidly shrinking naiveté, such
pieces foreshadowed a poetic revolution just outside the field
of national awareness. What an incredible time to be a student
and distracted by life!
As we look back on it, in fact, summer 1963 was the real turning
point for students of the arts in Detroit. Many of us at Wayne State
University were frustrated at the lack of connection between
our classes and the political realities of the Civil Rights and
anti-nuclear movements, and avant-garde developments that we
could read about in Kulchur, The Jazz Review, Downbeat, Film
Culture, The Village Voice, and a seminal anthology edited by
Donald Allen, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.
IMPRESSIONS
Our yearning for creative possibility hung over Second Avenue
south of campus like a dense cloud. We almost seemed to be
teenagers again, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. But one
day photographer and film-maker Saul Columbus introduced me
to Sheila and Carl Schurer, who had two little kids and more life
experience than any of us, she a passionate literary scholar and he
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Robin Eichele
a painter immersed in abstract expressionism. Immediately we
began an exciting conversation about art and community, until
the idea for the Red Door Gallery came along as natural as you
please. Carl knew Larry Weiner, a young painter whose father
owned the car wash just south of Willis on Second, and soon we
had another collaborator, as well as a funky storefront that the
father let us rent cheap, right next to Larry's own studio. After
we cleaned and painted the space, made sure the toilet worked,
and put out our sign, folks from the surrounding apartment
buildings drifted in and started volunteering to keep the project
open every afternoon, in shifts, and especially on weekends. The
shows rotated every month, and we used the gallery for more
than exhibitions.
Jazz trumpeter Charles Moore brought along a portable record
player, and often practiced along with Coltrane's 1963 Impulse
release, Impressions — I'll always remember the haunting
sound of "India" as 'Trane and Eric Dolphy described harmonic
modillions in the air. Poet Robin Eichele dropped in to talk
poetics, and sometimes gave a reading from his work, as well
as lending a hand. There were evenings of New American
cinema, one raided by the Detroit vice squad looking for
(nonexistent) porn. And for one whole week, we hosted Ann
Artists Workshop reading, 1965. L to R: John Sinclair, George Tysh,
Gayle Pearl, Robin Eichele
Arbor's experimental ONCE group (composers Robert Ashley
and Gordon Mumma, painter Mary Ashley, and filmmaker
George Manupelli, et al) who made the gallery the site of daily
happenings. As we were preparing for this thrilling series, WSU
professor-poet Keith Waldrop (instructor of a poetry class that
read Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, alongside the
Donald Hall academics) dropped by with a guest: author Robert
Creeley would read on campus that night and inaugurate our
collective experience of the poetic sublime (followed later that
semester by a Waldrop-organized reading by Robert Duncan,
another mind-altering event).
The Red Door was truly DIY avant la lettre, as we took the means
of production and distribution into our own hands. There were
solo shows of painting by Carl, Larry, and Eizo Nishiura, as well
as the ONCE events, a collage show, and even one of abstractions
from Poland(!!) that Dr. Edmund Ordon, my Polish prof, helped
arrange. But typically, the art critics from the Detroit News
or Free Press stayed away, no matter how many press releases,
flyers, and personal invitations we sent them. Thankfully, the
gallery was at least documented by photographs that one of its
founders, Leni Sinclair (then Magdalena Arndt), took near the
beginning of her luminous career.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
A LOVE SUPREME
The Red Door was quintessentially a group effort. If we had
counted on just the half-dozen founders to keep it open, it might
have lasted a month or two. Yet towards the end of our first
(and only) year, Flint poet and WSU graduate student John
Sinclair walked tentatively by the door, too intimidated by "all
the beatniks in there." Instead it took a chance encounter, in the
spirit of Surrealism, for us to connect one afternoon on Second
Avenue. As I stood at a corner waiting to cross, a tall, bearded
hipster commented on the Coltrane album I was carrying, and
the rest was fortuitous history. Within a few days, John met the
gallery crowd, and proceeded to bring in his own friends, thereby
vastly expanding our human resources. And when discussion
turned to music and poetry, we discovered a world of overlapping
interests: 'Trane, Miles, Monk, Ornette, Mingus, Cecil Taylor,
Archie Shepp, LeRoi Jones, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Olson, Creeley,
etc. John knew the southeast Michigan jazz scene better than
any of us, and brought in drummer Danny Spencer, as well as
prose experimenter James Semark, and countless others. Before
the summer of 1964 was gone, a new group dedicated itself to a
much broader venture, the creation of a communal performance
space supported by three collectively rented apartment buildings
(a true experiment in socialist housing):
...a place for artists — musicians, painters, poets, writers,
film-makers — who are committed to their art and to the
concept of community involvement to meet and work
with one another in an open, warm, loving, supportive
environment (what they don't get in the 'real' world)...
the success of which depends solely on those involved
with it. To this end we have acquired a 'studio' workshop
which will be maintained (rent, electricity, heat) by the
artists themselves... 4
Detroit Institute of Arts curator Mary Jane Jacobs' excellent
narrative of general DAW history is included in the catalogue for
the 1980 exhibition, Kick Out the Jams: Detroit's Cass Corridor
1963-1977. But much less has been written about an essential
aspect of our lives in the Workshop's first year: our
intellectual concerns.
OLD SCHOOL / NEW SCHOOL
Among the theoretical underpinnings of Workshop activity, one
was a text, the other a shared understanding. Charles Olson's
seminal essay, Projective Verse, insists (notably all in caps),
"FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT"
— which opens a universe of poetic possibilities, away from
an insistence on academic, closed forms (sonnets, sestinas,
villanelles) and towards organic developments in form and the
poetic line based on the poet's breath (for example, the fecund
differences in the "breathing" of a Ginsberg and a Creeley, a
Whitman and a Dickinson, an O'Hara and a Levertov). The
writers at the Workshop spent hours discussing the dozen pages
of Olson's manifesto, clarifying its implications for ourselves,
and teaching it as part of the various classes we offered in
the spirit of a people's free school. Rather than limiting our
explorations, as a set of dogmatic precepts might, the essay
radically expanded them.
What this concentrated study afforded us was a fantastic jolt of
enthusiasm, and an education absolutely not available then at any
university. Above all, the accent at DAW was on self-education,
a concept that came along simply because it had to. The air
of early-Sixties America, despite so many new energies, was
still polluted by a centuries-old elitism. I remember that when
around 1962 I played a Ravi Shankar record for my Humanities
prof (a relatively young guy), he asked me what it was. When I
said, "North Indian classical music," he answered, no, that it
was folk music. Accordingly, jazz in "high culture" quarters, and
because of its "low" African-American origins, was an object
of derision, or suspicion at best. Robert Bly, in an infamous
issue of his academic poetry journal The Sixties, gave the Tin
Ear Award to Louis Zukofsky, one of the most amazing lyrical
poets in American history. Meanwhile university poetasters
all over the country were mired in the stifling orthodoxy of the
T.S. Eliot-Allen Tate-Robert Lowell-John Berryman tradition.
Yet these details of the landscape only intensified our contempt
for the academy's conservatism, and we reacted by trusting and
informing ourselves.
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Leni and John Sinclair, 1964 (photographer unknown)
French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in a groundbreaking text
entitled The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation, discusses examples of self-instruction from
early-19th-century Europe, and the revolutionary practices of
working class students engaged in learning for themselves, on
their own terms. Although Rancière's book first appeared in 1987,
more than twenty years after our DAW experience, he develops
a unique understanding in it of key presuppositions of nonhierarchical
learning. The institution of the university, as it has
been constituted for centuries, is founded on essential inequality.
Professors maintain a hierarchical system of explications,
inevitable exclusions, and (dis)approval, often limiting students'
access to the very (disruptive, investigative) ideas that the latter
desperately need. And the legendary boredom of the typical
classroom derives, at least in part, from the situation of the
professor with his overflowing bottle of knowledge that pours
a tiny serving into each student's glass of ignorance i.e. lack of
experience.
Rancière maintains that a pivotal notion underlying any
project of collective enlightenment is that of the equality
of intelligence:
We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated
that would be a society of artists. Such a society would
repudiate the division between those who know and those
who don't, between those who possess or don't possess
the property of intelligence. It would only know minds in
action: people who do, who speak about what they are
doing, and who thus transform all their works into ways of
demonstrating the humanity that is in them as in everyone.
Such people would know that no one is born with more
intelligence than his neighbor, that the superiority that
someone might manifest is only the fruit of as tenacious
an application to working with words as another might
show to working with tools; that the inferiority of someone
else is the consequence of circumstances that didn't
compel him to seek harder. In short, they would know
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
that the perfection someone directs towards his own art
is no more than the particular application of the power
common to all reasonable beings... 5
By teaching ourselves, immersing ourselves in the everexpanding
search for poetry (or fiction, music, painting,
photography, film, et al), we demonstrated to each other the
power of will over intelligence — just as the best way to learn a
language has always been to immerse oneself in the community
of that language. And those of us who worked a little harder
would discover that the French word poésie is poezja in Polish.
When I first read Jack Spicer's The Holy Grail in 1964, it puzzled,
seduced, and inspired me in ways that I couldn't have imagined
in 1959, when my experience with poetry was a few works by Walt
Whitman and Langston Hughes. Of course, in the interim I had
read Ginsberg, Creeley, Duncan, Olson, Zukofsky, LeRoi Jones,
etc.etc. But there also was no exam forthcoming on Spicer, no
professorial explication, no right or wrong way of reading him,
just my will and passion. Into a matrix of King Arthur, Lancelot,
and the Round Table, Spicer drops references to Tarawa (the
horrific 1943 battle between US and Japanese forces), Las Vegas,
the Wizard of Oz, etc. 6 It was entirely up to me to work with all
that, and then share the fruits of my labor with others.
At various times and intensities, our collective reading list
included, among many other titles: Creeley's For Love and his
novel The Island (his emphasis on the rhythms of speech and
thought); Olson's Call Me Ishmael, The Maximus Poems, and
Human Universe and Other Essays (his call for an engagement
with the body politic and a poetics of immersion); Robert
Duncan's The Opening of the Field (the intense focus on modern
lyricism); Jack Spicer's The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether,
The Holy Grail, and Language (his concept of taking dictation
from inside and "outside" the language); Denise Levertov's With
Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (its formal, lyrical radiance); Gary
Snyder's Riprap and Myths & Texts (the focus on wilderness, Zen
meditation, and the materiality of the line); LeRoi Jones (Amiri
Baraka)'s The Dead Lecturer and Tales (his commitment to a
community-class analysis, as well as the inflections of free jazz);
Louis Zukofsky's All: the Collected Short Poems, A Test of Poetry,
and Bottom: On Shakespeare (his exquisite ear and example
of not throwing out the baby — Catullus, Shakespeare, the
Metaphysical Poets — with the academic bathwater); the novels
of William Burroughs (the centrality of the cut-up method);
Ginsberg's ecstatic Howl, Kaddish, and Reality Sandwiches
(his debt to Surrealism, the Hebrew prophets, jazz, and the
compositional idea "first thought, best thought"); John Wieners'
Hotel Wentley Poems and Ace of Pentacles (painful lyricism for
the ages); Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency and
Lunch Poems (his Whitmanesque embrace of life, our times,
and poetic invention); William Carlos Williams' Spring and All
and Paterson (maybe the father of us all); and various writings
by Wilhelm Reich, Buckminster Fuller, Rachel Carson, Carl O.
Sauer, Malcolm X, A.B. Spellman, Jonas Mekas, Diane di Prima,
Philip Whalen, Gregory Corso, Hubert Selby Jr., John Rechy,
Jack Kerouac, Douglas Woolf, Fielding Dawson, ad infinitum.
The writers of the Workshop — Robin Eichele, Bill Harris, James
Semark, John Sinclair, Allen Van Newkirk, Jerry Younkins,
and I (among many others) — published our work in the form of
chapbooks, broadsides, and magazines (notably, WORK, focused
on writing, and CHANGE and WHERE, on music) under the
auspices of the Artists Workshop Press, a mimeo affair run by
Robin, and graced with photos by Leni.
However, the virtually unavoidable consciousness we shared
was of an America gone insane with repressive violence. By
the end of March 1965, JFK, Malcolm X, and Viola Liuzzo had
been murdered, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King
Jr., Robert Kennedy, George Jackson, countless Black Panthers
and other activists were soon to come (a leitmotif stretching to
2015). What we treasured in jazz, America's indigenous avantgarde,
were its roots in an oppressed but uncowed community, its
resistance to the consequences of slavery, and its joyous stance
when it came to collective, spontaneous creativity. Yet jazz for us
was an intellectual model as well. Just as John Cage awoke us to
indeterminacy and silence (that all sounds, including those of the
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widest varieties of language, could be music), and Charles Olson
proposed a dialectics of projective verse (that poetic form was a
matter of existential choice for the poet), so Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington, et al proposed the life-affirming adventure of
improvisation. We embraced their indispensable connection
to contemporary thought and writing.
As 21st-century Detroit arises from the ruins of exploitation,
the transformative role of its artists and art projects will be
in the relationships they forge with the community at large.
Henceforth, we refuse to consider the practice of art simply
as a professional meal ticket or the production of investment
objects for the ultra-rich. The historic antecedents to such an
awareness are many: we look to the engagement of the Russian
THIS IS OUR MUSIC
Although I'm giving short shrift to the DAW music scene, I'll
never forget the emotional-conceptual impact on all of us of the
Detroit Contemporary 5 (Charles Moore, trumpet; Larry Nozero,
Constructivists, the experiments of the French Situationists,
the voluminous writings of Jacques Rancière on the politics of
art and education, and the homegrown efforts of the mid-Sixties
Detroit Artists Workshop to rethink our difficult surroundings.
tenor sax; Ron English, guitar; John Dana, bass; and Danny
Spencer, drums). We poets may have been fledgling, but the
band's free jazz took everybody higher. Each Sunday afternoon,
writers and musicians performed for a packed crowd, one that
included Larry Weiner (who had become a filmmaker), Ellen
Phelan (the WSU art student who became an internationally
renowned painter); Leni Sinclair (who married John, and
brilliantly photographed Workshop activities and Detroit arts
in general); and such other resident musicians as Pierre Rochon,
Harvey Robb, and Ronnie Johnson, as well as visiting poets
Clayton Eshleman and Robert Creeley, Toronto poet Victor
Coleman, jazz superstar Charles Lloyd (who jammed with the
DC5), and eventually the Art Ensemble of Chicago (who stayed
1 Blues & Roots refers to an album of the same name, recorded by
Charles Mingus in 1959, released by Atlantic Records in 1960.
2 Robert Creeley, A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays (San
Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970), 40.
3 Kulchur 10 (New York: Kulchur Press, Summer 1963).
4 from The Artists’ Workshop Society: A “Manifesto” by John Sinclair,
November 1964 (see Addendum).
5 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Redwood City:
Stanford University Press, 1991), 71.
6 My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer,
ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2008).
7 Also see www.detroitartistsworkshop.com for a wealth of
information, documentation, and first-hand testimony on the DAW
phenomenon.
in residence for months), then the proto-punk MC5, as the DAW
directed its attention to the insurrectionary role of rock.
Long-term offshoots of the Workshop have included Ann and
Ken Mikolowski's generous, expansive Alternative Press, the
encyclopedic Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, the White
Panther Party, Trans-Love Energies, the Strata Concert Gallery,
WDET-FM's poetry broadcast "Dimension," and LINES: New
Writing at The Detroit Institute of Arts (1980-1991), all dedicated
to an ongoing awareness: the united intelligence of the people
will never be defeated.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
ADDENDUM
James called “perception at the pitch of passion.” And who better
to communicate to than those few people who are operating at the
same level of awareness and involvement as oneself?
THE ARTISTS’ WORKSHOP SOCIETY:
A “MANIFESTO”
/ John Sinclair
1 NOVEMBER 1964
Why a community of artists? We believe that one of the most
important things to a young, formative artist is having a group of
his peers (in the best sense of the word, taking into consideration
his advanced level of consciousness &c), that he can be a part of,
that he can talk to, work with, work out ideas, &c and can give him
support. Modern society has succeeded to a frightening degree in
alienating artists from each other (and of course from people in
general; or at least vice versa) and atomizing what could be a vital,
active community into a group of lone, defensive, hung-up people
who are afraid to talk to and/or work with anyone but themselves
and (maybe) three or four friends.
A community of artists means that a group of highly conscious
people have resolved their individual, ego problems and can help
each other in very real ways – by giving support, stimulation &c.
The artist working alone is cutting himself off from (though not
consciously I’m sure) from sources of inspiration and influence
that can help him immeasurably in his work. The lone artist has
no one to listen to his work (LeRoi Jones: “how you sound”), no
one to offer criticism, ideas &c that would bring his work into
sharper focus with itself. He stumbles along, hung up in his own
ego & his own work, no perspective, he can only listen to the
generations before him & those who are getting exposure now (if
he knows where to find them on his own) to get his inspiration &
perspective – solitary, at best an artificial situation. Hard to get
as excited, as completely involved in his work by himself; when
he can talk about it with/to others who are trying to do the same
thing as himself (i.e., create some poetry (read: beauty) “out of
the garbage of their lives” (LeRoi) and communicate it to others)
he can achieve and maintain the state of consciousness Henry
Poetry (or any art), does not need to be “sullen” (solus: alone) any
more. We are now in a period of expanded consciousness in all
the arts, the most immediately important aspect of which is the
transcendence of what is understood as the “ego” (in the accepted
– worst – sense of that word). Left alone without any real criticism
(i.e., “constructive” criticism from those who are involved in the
same thing you are, not from dilettantes & culture/vultures, ‘art
lovers’ &c), the artist’s peculiar ego swells, he becomes deadened
to his mistakes, he, after a while can’t bear real criticism, he’s
defensive, gets more atomized, separated, alone, can’t talk to
anyone, everyone else is crazy: becomes (alas!) the old “romantic”
figure, misunderstood, one man against the world – no good.
NOW is the time to find out what’s wrong with your work, NOW,
at least get an inkling of what other real people will think of it,
how it communicates, &c.
Another vital aspect of community thinking: each individual
involved must (– has to – ) learn a sense of personal responsibility:
must take an active role in the life of his community, assume
its problems and (this is too difficult any more) its rewards &
achievements, as his own, pitch in and help those around him
who are trying but who haven’t succeeded in getting themselves
together as soon as he has. This is not like trying to work with
(convert?) straight people (i.e., non-artists) – they have too far to
go anyway, hard to really help them, they aren’t in a supportive
environment, they have to go home at night, no good, they
really have not got a chance to make it. Artists, conversely, do
have the very best chance to achieve higher & more productive
levels of consciousness: they exist, for the most (& best) part,
outside the existing social system, aren’t hung up by pettiness,
have a chance to really get into their work, the best chance – by
virtue of their distance from what its pitiable inhabitants call
the “real” world (bombs, bureaucrats, greed, politics, “what filth
deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours”
– [William] Burroughs), artists can transcend that swamp of
artificial reality and have a chance at putting love and help into
action in making their own reality.
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So: what we want is a place for artists – musicians, painters, poets,
writers, film-makers – who are committed to their art and to
the concept of community involvement to meet and work with
one another in an open, warm, loving, supportive environment
(– what they don’t get in the “real” world) – a place for people to
come together as equals in a community venture the success of
which depends solely upon those involved with it. To this end we
have acquired a “studio” workshop which will be maintained (rent,
electricity, heat) by the artists themselves, through individual
subscriptions of $5.00 each (i.e. initial investment – the pledge
will be adjusted, on a monthly basis, and probably downward,
as the Workshop program is totally implemented and we have a
concrete figure for maintenance costs.) This method of supporting
the Artists Workshop is necessary, we feel, because:
1) Each member of the Workshop is to assume an equal
responsibility in the project’s success;
2) Members have to go into their already near-empty pockets,
thus the project cannot be treated lightly;
3) We feel that any commercial means of support, at least
(& especially) in the beginning, would tend to create an
artificial community hung together on money, rather than
a genuine community built on mutual need and mutual
support and interest;
4) No “outside” pressures, hang-ups, interferences;
5) The Workshop ideal can be maintained, i.e. there will
be no pressure on artists to produce work that would
have commercial success, rather than integrity and
aesthetic honesty, as its ultimate purpose.
We do believe, however, that commercial ventures will come into
being as logical and desirable outgrowths of the Workshop as it has
been conceived and as it is now operating. For example, we can see
in the future a coffee shop where musicians would present their
work; a gallery for painters and other graphic artists to exhibit
their work; a small printing and/or publishing concern through
which poets & writers could introduce their work; an operating
film society that would enable local film-makers to produce and
possibly market cinematic ideas.
Other individual projects that are being planned as part of the
workshop’s total program: lectures on modern music, painting,
poetry and film, by the artists themselves, that would serve to
introduce & enlighten an often-puzzled public to the artists’ aims,
purposes, & finished work; free jazz concerts and workshops,
featuring in particular the work of Detroit’s musical ‘avant-garde,’
with commentary on their work by the musicians themselves
and by enlightened critics & students of the music; interpretive
poetry readings, with background and explanatory commentary
by the poets; screenings of films by Detroit experimenters and by
independent film-makers from New York and San Francisco who
are involved in what has been called the “New American Cinema,”
and whose work is not readily available, via commercial theaters,
to its eager audience. All these will be “free,” non-commercial
affairs that are planned, programmed, & produced by the artists
themselves.
We sincerely believe that our Artists Workshop Society can and will
succeed: the time is over-ripe, the people are ready to convert their
ideals into real action, there is no real reason why we can’t make
it. We need all the support we can get, especially your spiritual
support and blessing; we are trying to establish ties with the
isolated groups of artists that exist in this country and throughout
the universe, and we sincerely wish to cooperate with anyone who
will let us. Please help. 7 ■
-----------------------------------------------------
ARTISTS WORKSHOP SOCIETY
JOHN SINCLAIR ROBIN EICHELE
CHARLES MOORE GEORGE TYSH
LARRY WEINER DANNY SPENCER
JAMES SEMARK RICHARD TOBIAS
GAYLE PEARL ALLISTER MCKENZIE
ELLEN PHELAN PAUL SEDAN
BILL REID
DAVID HOMICZ
JOE MULKEY
BOB MARSH
-----------------------------------------------------
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
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John Wieners at the Artists Workshop in 1965
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Photographer of a Revolution,
The Girl with the Camera: the
photography of Leni Sinclair.
/ EMI FONTANA / ALL PHOTOS BY LENI SINCLAIR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
White Panthers Party members posing in front of 1520 Hill Street in Ann Arbor, 1970.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
It’s a cold November evening in 1969, in Buffalo NY. An icy breeze is
blowing outside; the university gym is packed, inside the air is warm
and dense from the smell of sweat and marijuana.
“I want you to hold your hands, ” a member of the MC5 shouts at the crowd.
The crowd obeys.
“Now I want you to take a deep breath in… Now exhale. Inhale…”
It goes on and on until a thousand young bodies filling the room
start slipping into a meditative, hypnotic state. Demarcation
lines between bodies fade; the multitude becomes one marvelous
revolutionary body lost in deep ecstasy. Leni Sinclair’s camera
captures this instant of magic in one picture. In spite of the
freezing quality of the medium, Leni’s talent is able to convey
the fluidity of that moment as well as many others. We look at the
picture waiting for the bodies to start swaying again in perpetual
motion. A young and shaggy Abbie Hoffman is leaning barechested
against a car, looking at us with sexy irreverence. The day
before the concert, he spoke at the same conference, haranguing
the crowd, “We gotta learn how to breathe together. If you don’t
learn how to do that, the government is going to show you how to
hang together.” Physicality is one of the first words that comes to
mind looking at Leni’s work. She is moving through an incredible
landscape of bodies: sleeping bodies, ecstatic bodies, intoxicated
bodies, and revolutionary bodies. Before the digital era, it took
one click, one breath, to shoot a great picture. In the cycle of
a breath, reality gets framed in an instant that can stand for
eternity. Looking now at the photography of Leni Sinclair, we are
able to perceive the gravity of a moment that has been handed over
to history, but we can still feel the flow of life, breezing through it.
Susan Sontag, in her well known essay On Photography, states,
“To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are,
in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least as long as it
takes to get a “good” picture), to be in complicity with whatever
makes the subject interesting.” Leni is the photographer of
a revolution; she is interested in maintaining the status quo
of permanent revolution in her photography, as well as in her
life. Since I first saw Leni’s pictures, many years ago, I met her
and heard some of her stories, it’s has been difficult for me not
to draw a parallel between Leni Sinclair’s life and work and
another great woman photographer, Tina Modotti. It is almost
like these two women represent the two halves of the twentieth
century, mirroring each other. Both Europeans (Tina from
Italy and Leni from East Germany) came to America at an
early age, both finding themselves in the midst of a revolution,
experimenting with the medium of photography, immersed in
the aesthetics of the eras they were living in, getting romantically
involved with charismatic men, and constantly blurring the
lines between art and life. Tina Modotti, in the epistolary with
her mentor and lover, Edward Weston, expressed her desire
to reconcile in her photography the dichotomy between the
eternal motion of life and the fixity of forms that is peculiar
to the medium. Circa forty years later, in Leni Sinclair’s
photography, this statement became a fulfilled prophecy.
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Black Panthers demonstrating in front of the Federal Building in Detroit, 1969.
Audience at the Buffalo Dope Conference in 1969.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
John Sinclair and members of the MC5 playing with guns in 1969.
I have seen Leni working. She has a small and bendy body. She has
the capability of being there and disappearing at the same time
while she is taking pictures; her body squeezes and contorts until
she becomes even smaller, and if you are looking for her while she
is on the job, often you are not going to find her. She gets lost and
confused in the crowd. “Where is Leni? Where is Leni?” When
finally, behind the camera, you encounter her eyes again, they are
full of love, curiosity and a burning passion for life. Leni’s gaze is
feminine and sensual; she infuses her photographs with the same
sensuality. She operates behind the camera in a state of perennial
complicity with the subjects of her pictures. These subjects are
often her friends, lovers, husband, family and comrades, what
they are fighting for: equality, free love, drugs, rock and roll,
and what they are fighting against: authority, cops, conventions.
However, there is gravity in Leni’s pictures, too; in fact, she
portrays some very dramatic moments of American History.
In the late sixties the Black Panther movement agitates the sleep
of Middle America, challenging it to transform the American
Dream into a nightmare. Black Panther militants are the subjects
of many of Leni’s photographs. In one of the most iconic of these
pictures, three young African American men are standing on
the sidewalk holding white flags with the symbol of the Black
Panther ready to pounce. The middle of the banner reads, “Free
Huey." They are asking for the liberation of Huey Newton, one of
the leaders of the movement. Two of the young men are wearing
berets, the third one has a short Afro, and all of them are bearing
very grave expressions on their young faces. They seem to be
looking into the void of a future that has been granted by the
politics of that moment, but in the force of their determination
we can still see hope. In the background of the picture, an older
white man simply tries to ignore the whole scene while a young
black man in a suit looks at the protesters with an expression of
curiosity and questioning on his face. In one of the group shots
of the White Panther party, cofounded by Leni, with her former
husband John Sinclair, there is a very different atmosphere. The
picture is taken in front of their headquarters on Hill Street
in Detroit. In this shot, the sense of solemnity that permeates
the Black Panther portraits is lost, replaced by an expression of
stupor and self-consciousness on the faces of the White Panther
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One naked photographer photographing another naked photographer at Woodstock in 1969.
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
militants, who are holding the guns in a manner that looks
clumsy, almost comedic. White hippies with guns. We could
almost read a sense of embarrassment especially on the women’s
faces. The centerpiece of this shot is a woman with her child,
close to another woman with a gun and a baby. Leni is behind
the camera, but she is one of these women; she is an insider,
nevertheless her eye catches
all the contradictions of an
era. While in the Black Panther
movement the possession of
weapons had very specific
political meaning, which was
a different take from that of the
WPP. Pun Plamondon, another
one of the founders, promoted
the use of weapons, or rather,
its aesthetic, amongst the
WPP militants, from a
different point of view: “Get
a gun brother, learn how to
use it. You are going to need it
pretty soon. You are a White
Panther, act like one.” Act like
one? And what were the sisters
doing with their guns and their
babies? Leni documents the
sixties counterculture from
the point of view of someone
who is really immersed in that
world. Roland Barthes says
great photographers operate as mythologists: Nadar of the
French bourgeoisie, Sander of pre-Nazi Germany, and Avedon
of New York high society. Leni Sinclair narrates the myth of the
exceptional season of sixties American counterculture and does
it as an insider; actually more than just an insider, a propelling
force of that same movement. As great narrators and artists do,
while she is telling us the story, she lets another tale emerge
from the oblivion, the tale that always hides in the folds of the
In one of Leni’s pictures we see a
beautiful young man, fully naked,
portrayed in the gesture of taking
a picture, a picture of Leni, while
Leni is taking a picture of him. The
camera he is holding hides his face.
His penis and camera dominate
the composition. This picture is
taken roughly in the same year as
Blow up, the Antonioni movie that
celebrates the centrality of the
male gaze in counterculture. One
decade prior to the pivotal thesis
of film theorist Laura Mulvey, that
the male gaze focuses on female
objects, leaving the female as a
passive spectator, Leni created
the exception.
main history: it is the story of women who lived in a world still
dominated by men and by male culture, where women were
still casted according to stereotypes, switching from ‘mother
earth’ to ‘easy lay’; where they were often put in the difficult
position of being revolutionary, operating outside of the law,
handling guns, being sexually open, taking drugs like their men,
but on top of that, still making
babies, being the caretakers of
their children, the guardian
angels of their men when they
got in trouble, becoming the
advocates of their liberation
when they went to jail. When
John Sinclair got incarcerated,
Leni became the organizer and
leader of the movement for his
liberation. That movement
is part of American history.
Leni’s real weapon is the
camera. She shoots against the
oppressors, against American
capitalist society, against
imperialism, but in a more
subtle way that is fully readable
to us now, she also shoots
against the chauvinism and
machismo hidden in the “longhaired
dope-smoking culture”
of which John Sinclair and
several other white men were undiscussed and recognized leaders.
In one of Leni’s pictures we see a beautiful young man, fully
naked, portrayed in the gesture of taking a picture, a picture
of Leni, while Leni is taking a picture of him. The camera
he is holding hides his face. His penis and camera dominate
the composition. This picture is taken roughly in the same
year as Blow up, the Antonioni movie that celebrates the
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Abbie Hoffman at the Underground Media Conference in Ann Arbor, 1969. Cynthia Plaster Caster in Ann Arbor, 1968.
centrality of the male gaze in counterculture. One decade
prior to the pivotal thesis of film theorist Laura Mulvey,
that the male gaze focuses on female objects, leaving the
female as a passive spectator, Leni created the exception.
There is another picture that we could read as the negative of the
one described above: Leni has pointed her camera right inside
The solidarity between the Sinclairs
and the band began on August 7, 1966,
with Leni literally unplugging them
during a concert to celebrate John’s
release from his first incarceration for
a minor marijuana offense. The MC5
started to play so loudly that Leni was
afraid their neighbors would call the
police and John would be taken right
back to jail.
the empty space of a rifle barrel that constitutes the main focus.
Out of focus with a blur effect, the silhouette of the holder of
the weapon emerges from the background with long black hair.
Music was all around then, mainly rock and roll. One of the
greatest intuitions of John Sinclair was that pop music was
the best way to influence youth’s way of thinking politics. He
didn’t succeed, but the intuition was brilliant and convinced
the F.B.I. The MC5 were the minstrels of the revolution. The
solidarity between the Sinclairs and the band began on August
7, 1966, with Leni literally unplugging them during a concert to
celebrate John’s release from his first incarceration for a minor
marijuana offense. The MC5 started to play so loudly that Leni
was afraid their neighbors would call the police and John would
be taken right back to jail. She first tried to tell them to lower
the volume, but of course they couldn’t hear her, so she pulled
the plug. John became their manager and Leni their in-house
photographer, “Just because she had a camera,” as she recalled.
At the time, electric guitar was the other weapon in order. In
many of Leni’s pictures, guns and guitars are brandished at once,
while the stereotype of the white male rock god was growing
out of 1960s counterculture with the manhandling of electric
guitars being an integral part of it. The magazine Rolling Stone
strongly contributed to the creation and popularization of that
iconography. Founded in 1967, until 1969, most of the magazine
covers were shot live, in situations in which the photographers
were in psychological proximity to the performers; however,
already in the middle of that same year, they started to portray
the musicians in studios. The pictures were often cut out on white
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
The MC5 in Detroit in 1967.
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backgrounds that, until now, remain the trademark of Rolling
Stones covers. In one of the most extensive survey shows of rock
photography, held at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009, Who Shot
Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present Leni
Sinclair’s work was not included. Her photography might be at
the root of the genre, and beyond, just before it sclerotized into
the frozen iconography of white masculinity we all know about,
which is especially startling because rock and roll was born on
the backdrop of the civil rights battles against racial and gender
segregation. Leni portrays the myth, but once again her gaze plays
with it with irony and sensuality as she is catching the myths off
guard, literally unplugged, bringing the contradictions to surface.
The MC5 are quite a phenomenon in rock-and-roll history and
very much due to the touch of John Sinclair. They were the
only rock-and-roll band that officially represented a political
extremist group, actually recruiting militants through their
concerts. Many critics regard them as precursors of punk.
Their stage acts and sets were also very peculiar. The use of
the American flag as a background and the toting around and
brandishing of rifles made them a unique subject for Leni’s
camera. But once again the qualities that are coming through
the grain of these pictures are very different from what we could
expect. There is an intimacy and sweetness that is mostly alien
to the way rock-and-roll photography is intended now. Often Leni
captures boyish expressions on the band members’ faces that
are sexy and endearing, very far away from the rock-and-roll
god stereotype. There is a great picture of them showing their
biceps and winking at the camera and another one in which
the band is posing with the background of the American flag.
They are holding coffee mugs and on a table in front of them,
the centerpiece is a sewing machine. If MC5 are considered
predecessors of punk, Leni’s pictures definitely contribute
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Fred Smith of the MC5 playing with a rifle in 1969.
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
to this critical reading. Punk code is far more complex than
traditional rock and roll, especially when it comes to gender and
role-playing, as well as the importance of DIY (do it yourself)
culture. On gender and DIY issues, we can certainly consider
Cynthia Plaster Caster from Chicago a bright star. Cynthia
describes herself as ‘a recovering groupie’ and we can believe
that in good faith she assumed that going around with a few
helpers to cast erected penises of rock stars was part of her
recovery program. Leni took a great portrait of Plaster Caster:
Cynthia is holding and showing some of her creations to the
camera, looking like a bulimic presenting some kind of cakes
she is used to binging on. Plaster Caster art works and gestures
are much more subtle and interesting than what she herself
thought. Frank Zappa definitely was of the same opinion when he
became her patron, but was smart enough to refuse to get casted.
It seems to be a common threat for women coming out of the sixties
counterculture to be really modest about their contribution to
that history. When you talk to them, they will tell you that they
just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Leni
would tell you that all of that happened just because she had a
camera. Maybe she didn’t know it then, but today through her
pictures we can have a more profound reading and understanding
of a pivotal moment in the cultural history of the West.
I was born in the early sixties and came of age thinking that the
sixties was the coolest time. I would have loved to be a young woman
then, to grow my hair long and live in a commune. I almost
did anyway. As many people of my generation, I idealized
the youth movement that came before mine. We now know
well how tough the position of women in the countercultural
movement of the sixties was, but undeniably those were times
of radical transformations, especially about female roles
in society. Through her life and through her photography,
Leni Sinclair has been a witness and an agent of those
changes. We look at her photos now and we can see time
shifting. Being able to convey these changes while they
were happening is certainly one of the main qualities of
her photographic oeuvre.
Leni Sinclair just happened to be a girl with a camera back
then, but she turned it against the MC5 while they were singing:
“I saw you standing in there / I saw your long / Saw your long
hair … All I want to do now, girl / Is look at you looking at you
baby/Look at you, looking at you baby / Yeah, yeah, hey…” ■
@Emi Fontana, South Pasadena July 2014
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Invented Landscape, NYC 2005
Fun House RIde Attendant
Carnival Midway 20
All work and all photos by Carlos Diaz, courtesy of the artist.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
A CONVERSATION
WITH CARLOS DIAZ
/ MARY MCNICHOLS, PH.D
While he initially considered a career in engineering, Carlos Diaz earned his BFA
in photography from the Center for Creative Studies (CCS), now the College for
Creative Studies, in 1980 and his MFA in photography from the University of Michigan in
1983. Diaz has been the recipient of many awards, including a 2010 Kresge Foundation
Community Arts Grant. His work is installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York as well as at the Detroit Institute of Arts among many other museums and galleries.
It is currently represented by the David Klein Gallery in Birmingham and Detroit, Michigan.
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Having been a member of the Department of Photography at
the College for Creative Studies since 1984, Diaz also served
as the Chair of that Department between 1994 to 2000. He is
currently Professor of Photography at CCS. He has worked with
Bill Rauhauser, both as his student and colleague during their
respective times at CCS.
Carlos Diaz’s work in the carnival theme has evolved into three
separate series: the carnival landscape; portraits of carnival
ride attendants; and his Invented Landscape series, inspired
by mechanical invention as well as his interest in the Coney
Island Amusement Park. Diaz gravitates toward the paradoxical
nature of the carnival offering, as it gives an opportunity for
escapism while yet being, as the artist describes it, “a constructed
artificial façade, a transient world made up of strange mechanical
contraptions.” In photographs reminiscent of what Guy Debord
characterized as a society of the spectacle, Diaz presents to the
viewer - as actors on a stage - a poignant glimpse of the carnival
attendants and the world that they inhabit.
Diaz’s most recent bodies of work are entitled Rouge: The Legacy
of Detroit and the Autoworkers and Diorama: Destiny, Deceit,
Displacement: The Native American and Manifest Destiny.
Mary McNichols: You grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, an
industrial center, and worked in mechanical drawing and design
for a number of years. What led you to leave your position as a
mechanical draftsman and become a photographer?
Carlos Diaz: The short answer is that I had become bored and
had lost the passion I once had for the profession. It began
to feel like the same routine, day in and day out. The actual
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separation process probably began
as a result of some of my early college
class assignments which provided an
opportunity for a much greater degree
of exploration and creativity. After
returning from the service around
1973, I was employed as a draftsman by
General Motors at the General Motors
Technical Center in Warren, Michigan.
Word had gotten around that I had taken
some photography/art classes at the local
community college and was currently
attending an evening photography class
at the Center for Creative Studies (CCS),
now the College for Creative Studies. After
a couple of trial runs in the darkroom, the
two company staff photographers soon
asked if I would like to take charge of
the darkroom facilities since they would
both be away for several weeks shooting
on location. I accepted the offer and, the
minute I put out the sign, Do Not Enter
- Processing Film, and turned on the
darkroom lights, there was no turning
back. That visceral connection to the
darkroom and potential for magic that
I felt then I continue to enjoy to this day.
About a year later in 1976, when General
Motors’ contract with the government
expired, my colleagues and I were
temporarily laid off. This, of course, was
the opportunity I had been waiting for,
and I immediately enrolled as a fulltime
student at CCS. Subsequently, I was
contacted for a number of job interviews,
which I refused. As a result, I lost my
unemployment benefits, but the G.I.
Bill, scholarships and grants made up
the difference, and the rest is history.
It is a true testament to the connection
between progress and taking chances, and
I sometimes wonder how things would
have been different had I not taken this
leap of faith.
My experience and the three years that I
attended CCS were transformative in so
many ways. Soon after starting school, I
took my first class with Bill Rauhauser;
this was the beginning of a thirty-nine
year relationship. The opportunity to
work with Bill at this formative time in
my career had a profound impact on the
manner with which I would approach my
work and my art. Through the years, Bill
has been a mentor, friend, and source
of inspiration to me, and when I began
teaching at CCS 31-years ago, he was
a guiding force and colleague. I feel
extremely fortunate that our paths came
together in such a meaningful way.
MM: How have those experiences - your
life growing up in Pontiac and your
experience as a mechanical draftsman
- influenced your work in photography?
CD: Where and when I grew up has had
everything to do with the work I produce
and how I respond to the world around
me through my work. My experiences
growing up in the 1950s in a true workingclass
town and in a traditional Mexican-
American community were formative.
I like to describe my life experience at
that time as the quintessential 1950s
cliché. My parents did a very good job
of sheltering my siblings and me from
the realities of our family’s economic
situation and from the world at large. I
had few social experiences outside of my
family circle and the Latino community.
As a child, I remember my mother always
having a camera around and often asking
me to take pictures. As a result, those
early years are well-documented and, in
the future, the camera would become my
access into other worlds!
After my father left the family farm in
Saginaw about 1945, he moved to Pontiac
to work in the Wilson Foundry. When he
and his boss at the foundry did not see
eye-to-eye, he quit that job and began
schooling to become a barber. Although
now officially retired, he continues - at
age 91 - to cut hair to this day.
My father’s barbershop was about a mile
and a half from our home and, somewhat
reminiscent of an episode from the Father
Knows Best or My Three Sons television
series, my brother and I would take turns
after school, walking along the railroad
tracks from home to the shop to sweep
the barbershop floor for a quarter. As a
result of having seen, first hand, my father
work at his practice through the years, my
understanding and appreciation of the
importance of passion and commitment
to one’s profession was developed. Upon
graduation, I knew that, as Pontiac was
a quintessential working-class town
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
whose epicenter was the auto industry,
became the nexus between my technical
time. Please describe how this research
any healthy young man who was willing
and analytical experiences and my
has informed your work.
to work was guaranteed a job upon
developing interest in the arts. As
graduation from high school. But I wanted
a result of the many years of having
CD: Much of my work relates to my interest
something more.
practiced mechanical drawing, I had
in the various forms of entertainment
learned to see and to represent the three-
prevalent at the turn of the century and
Various developments eventually led me
dimensional world on a two-dimensional
how these environments were in distinct
to photography. During the sophomore
plane. This is precisely what happens
contrast to the Victorian morals of the day.
year of high school, the school’s academic
when a photographer looks through
The Coney Island Amusement Park, the
counselors met with each student and
the camera’s viewfinder to ultimately
circus, circus sideshows, and the American
his or her parents to determine a career
conceive and construct a photograph.
carnival were manifestations of such
path. I had chosen the arts, but my
Whether consciously or unconsciously,
places. Through collecting and reading
parents insisted that I be placed in the
both the inherently literal discipline of
books on this topic, particularly about
“trade and industry” path which included
mechanical design and the expressive
Coney Island (made up of Steeplechase
mechanical drawing. Then, through the
and interpretive nature of photography
Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland), I began
high school’s Co-Op program, I began to
provide a place for my tendency and
to see the intrinsic connection between
work at an engineering firm during my
impulse toward formality.
the American Industrial Revolution,
junior and senior years. After graduation,
I worked full-time at an engineering firm
from 1969 to 1971 while concurrently
For my carnival landscape project, The
American Carnival Midway and, in fact,
which gave birth to a new working class,
and the resulting American amusement
park industry.
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attending the local community college.
for the past 35-years, I have chosen to use
When I was drafted in 1970, I applied
an 8 x 10 view camera specifically because
My series of hand-constructed collages,
for conscientious objector status, but
of the meditative, slow, and methodical
Invented Landscapes, on which I’ve
ultimately entered the service in 1971.
manner in which one must work. The
worked from 1996 to the present,
After an honorable discharge from the
ground glass (viewfinder) on this camera
reflects these interests. In the Invented
service in 1973, I was, ironically, employed
measures 8 x 10 inches which provides
Landscapes, I combine vintage steel-plate
by General Motors for the government’s
the opportunity and space for careful and
engravings of mechanical inventions from
Experimental Armor Tank Program. I left
critical composing.
the turn of the century (specifically from
the drafting and design profession when I
1840-1890) with my photographs of Coney
enrolled at the Center for Creative Studies
MM: Early on, you became interested in
Island, made in 1994-1996. Each image
as a full-time student. I had grown weary
and researched the Industrial Revolution
is one-of-a-kind and hand-made. Using
of the mechanical drawing profession and,
in this country and its relationship to
the illustrations of these newly-invented
although I had no intention of returning,
the American amusement industry,
mechanical contraptions, I reconstruct
during graduate school, I worked full-time
specifically, carnivals, circuses, and
– invent, if you will - fictional mechanical
for a year as a mechanical designer.
amusement parks. You’ve observed that
contraptions within the photographed
the advent of new machines and their
amusement park environment. A primary
Given its intrinsic connection to the
efficiency changed American culture by
intention in these images is to imply the
sciences and mechanics, photography
affording the working class more leisure
paradoxical duality of the ethos of the
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The Shaker Ride Attendant
Himalaya Ride Attendants
period, as well as the contrast between
freedom and restraint, pleasure and
pain, the moral and the immoral. The
Invented Landscapes are, simultaneously,
whimsical and ominous and suggest,
both literally and metaphorically, the
functional forms of labor as well as the fun
and fantasy of the carnival. Additionally,
there are signs within narratives that refer
to the relationship between humanity and
technology. Here too, there exists a duality
in that technology can be understood as
both friend and foe.
MM: There is, of course, a tradition in
American photography of the theme of side
show performers. The perspective of these
images ranges from that which would
seem exploitive (nineteenth-century
works such as Charles Eisenmann’s
photographs in his book Monsters of the
Golden Age; Max Rusid’s photographs in
his publication Photo Album of Human
Oddities; as well as those of Frank Wendt,
himself a student of Eisenmann) to those
of Diane Arbus which seem to go beyond
purely objective images to delve into the
poignancy of the lives of her subjects.
Please describe the perspective of your
portraits of carnival people.
CD: There certainly were instances
of exploitation, but the photographic
portraits that Wendt and Eisenmann
in particular made were instrumental
in establishing the popularity and,
consequently, the demand for the bestknown
“freaks” of the period. For these
physically-impaired “human oddities,”
the circus sideshow was their only means
of income, and most understood the
importance of being photographed. My
carnival portraits, as well as the black
motorcycle rider portraits, were done
out of a sense of wonder and curiosity. I
wanted to know and to better understand
these groups of individuals who are seen
as outside the mainstream of society.
They are groups on the fringe, on the
edge. In the case of the Latino immigrant
portraits, my intent was slightly different.
In this case, I wanted to express what I
already knew and the stories I’d been
told about these individuals. The act of
photographing them implied a degree
of greater importance. On another level,
to better understand “the other” is to
better understand “the self.” For me,
the camera has provided a means to
access, as well as to gain permission to
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Carnival Midway Carnival Midway 2
enter into, subcultures usually denied.
By photographing these individuals,
ultimately, I am paying homage to them.
the dichotomy inherent within life itself:
on one hand beautiful and utopian; on
the other, ugly and evil. On a broader
places. Here, we are transported to
exotic and unworldly places where we
embrace that which we know is not real
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When you isolate individuals through
level, I have described these artificial
and look beyond the façade. Here we are
the camera lens, you confer upon them a
landscapes as a Surrealist dream or
transformed and swept away into a world
higher degree of humanity.
nightmare where the unconscious and
of decadence. At the turn of the century,
the irrational are manifest. As a culture,
the amusement parks were in stark
MM: You stated during your lecture of
we thrive in a world of escapism, and
contrast to the Victorian “code of conduct”
October 1, 2009 at the Focus on Faculty
the photograph and photographically-
of the period and served as places for fun,
exhibition at Center Galleries at the
reproduced image has transformed us into
fantasy and escape.
College for Creative Studies that “The
“members of an image-sodden species.” 1
classic struggle between good and evil,
Guy Debord, the French Marxist theorist,
MM: Please describe your approach
the sacred and profane, is at the center
writer, filmmaker, member of the Lettrist
to your subjects.
of my work.” Please elaborate on how this
International, and founding member of
overarching theme is reflected in your
the Situationist International, coined
CD: My portraits are an attempt to present
various series.
the phrase society of the spectacle. He
some truth about the subject before the
believed that capitalism was transforming
camera, and are not staged. I will almost
CD: In essence, I see the carnival, the
culture into a façade of spectacle, into a
always photograph my subjects as I find
circus, and Coney Island in particular as a
world of artificiality. 2 The carnival and
them and only ask that they look into the
metaphor for life. These places represent
Las Vegas are classic examples of such
camera. It was when I first saw the work of
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Installation, The Unemployed Auto Worker, Pontiac Creative Art Center, 1991
Diane Arbus that I began to understand
the emotional and visceral power of
the photograph when you looked at the
subject and the subject looked back at you.
The way subjects naturally present
themselves to the camera is revealing in
and of itself. This lack of intervention
provides an opportunity for improvisation
and chance. My process is to first engage
the subjects in conversation to know
them better and, secondly, to allow them
to become more comfortable in front of
the camera and to present something of
what lies beneath the skin. My subjects
recognize and accept that they are being
photographed. They have a choice to
be photographed or not and, when they
choose to be photographed, they enter
into a collaborative agreement with me.
MM: Much of your work is concerned
with social issues - with, as you have
described it, “issues that lie below the
surface.” Your portraits of carnival
people are, of course, an example of this
interest. Please describe your installation
piece The Unemployed Auto Worker
exhibited at Pontiac’s Creative Art Center
in 1991, within these terms.
CD: The Unemployed Auto Worker
installation was my first and last
installation to date, although, I am
considering an interactive installation
of my Latino Immigrant series. The
Unemployed Auto Worker installation
resulted from a conversation with my older
brother, just recently laid-off from his job
of twenty-five years with General Motors.
When we spoke, for the first time ever, I
heard a sense of uncertainty in his voice.
At the time, the media never provided the
names and stories of those who had lost
their jobs, but rather, individuals became
mere statistics in its coverage. I wanted
to give a face to the faceless.
First, and in an act of protest, I wallpapered
the gallery walls with local
newspapers, symbolically emphasizing
that the media was thoroughly covering
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Latina Immigrant, Haylie Eduia Latino Immigrant, Gabriel Arteaga Latino Immigrant, Juan F. Almanza
the event. Second, I built a frame structure
Ford Historical Archives which I had
father was a migrant worker, farmer,
to simulate a typical working-class living
curated, and which included Charles
and foundry worker before becoming a
room, enclosed it in see-through plastic,
Sheeler’s iconic 1927 work Criss-Crossed
barber. From an early age, he would tell
and floated the structure from the ceiling.
Conveyers from the Ford Rouge Complex,
stories about his father’s journey north
Typical living room furniture was placed
was installed in the upper gallery.
to America and the struggle to survive
in the room, including a television.
Third, I included videotaped interviews
of ten unemployed auto workers and a
Additionally, local union chapters were
invited. They displayed historical union
documents and paraphernalia.
the odds he had encountered in pursuit
of his dreams.
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VHS player. In the gallery, I installed
On the title page of the portfolio, the
photographic studio portraits that I had
MM: Photographs from your most
following is included:
made on-site of the same ten unemployed
recent series, Beyond Borders: Latino
autoworkers. The photographs, which I
Immigrants and Southwest Detroit,
Tonight we shall eat the
had printed larger than life, were hung
some of which were installed in the
assumptions of ourselves
with fish string several inches away from
2011 Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition
of our house and where
the walls to deny their presence as works
Detroit Revealed: Photographs 2000-
we are going
of art. Finally and most importantly,
2010, include both portraits of the
Tonight we shall embark on
during the duration of the exhibition
Latino immigrants who live in that
the Floating Borderlands
and to express the importance of the
neighborhood as well as photographs
toward our liberation.
individual worker, I “hired” and paid
of their homes. Please describe the
- Juan Felipe Herrera 3
various unemployed auto workers to be
perspective of this series.
present in the living room to talk with
Although my father’s story is not
and to answer questions from visitors to
CD: Part 1 of this portfolio, Beyond
necessarily unique, as there were many
the exhibition.
Borders; Latino Immigrants and
who were willing to leave their home
Southwest Detroit, is a series of portraits
country for what they perceived to be
An exhibition of historic automobile
intended to celebrate and pay personal
a better and more prosperous life, his
manufacturing photographs from the
homage to the Latino immigrant. My
experience as that of all the others is
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unique! Today Latino immigrants are
blamed for a host of social ills and, as
“non-citizens,” they make easy targets
and convenient scapegoats. Since
immigrants are legally deprived of
many of the rights that U.S. citizens
enjoy, including the right to vote, elected
officials and the general public can overtly
blame, marginalize, and discriminate
against them with little repercussion.
Today, as in the past, Latino immigrants
form the latest iteration of cheap labor,
having no contract, no representation,
and few rights. Our agricultural
economy is, in fact, dependent upon just
such a population.
The Beyond Borders project began
several years ago because of my outrage
at the perpetually deplorable manner
in which Latino immigrants were being
portrayed en masse, both publicly and
politically, as illegal, undocumented,
and alien. During state and national
elections, and for the perceived benefit of
the politicians, the “immigrant problem”
is used to inflame, and in a manner that
is intended to systematically deny the
individual immigrant’s identity. This is a
simple but effective strategy because when
we begin to identify with the individual,
we begin to recognize the inhumanity
imposed upon these people! Throughout
America’s history, when economically
advantageous, we have welcomed and,
indeed, recruited the immigrant to this
country to work in the fields and factories
and in our homes and hotels. Then,
when the political climate changes and
immigrants are no longer needed, with
political red, white, and blue spectacle, we
deny that welcome through harassment,
deportation, and by building walls. I would
agree that this constitutes a policy of what
might be described as in the back door
and out the front.
I see the Mexican/American border, the
wall, the river and the desert, as symbols
of the classic demarcation between
desperation and hope. My intent is for
the faces in these portraits to be read as a
road map of the immigrants’ experiences
- their unique set of circumstances and the
story of their journey from the border
north. The circular motif framing the
subject is reminiscent of seventeenthcentury
Flemish painting and is intended
to represent the immigrants as nobility
and aristocracy. These portraits are, then,
my attempt to personify the people of this
community by removing the mask that
these individuals have been forced to wear.
Part 2 of the portfolio, Beyond Borders;
Latino Immigrants and Southwest
Detroit, is a series of the homes of
Southwest Detroit.
During the summer of 2010 while making
the immigrant portraits that form the first
part of this portfolio, I began taking walks
through the neighborhoods of Southwest
Detroit. During the process of making the
immigrant portraits, I simultaneously
audio-taped conversations with the
subjects. As a result, each individual’s
set of circumstances detailing his/her
trip north beyond the border came to
light, and the explicit details revealed
by each immigrant’s story were beyond
my imagination. These walks through
the neighborhood began partially as a
result of my not being from the Southwest
Detroit community; however, in the end,
my experience became both a tangible
and transcendent way to identify with
the people in the portraits.
The beautiful and warm seasonal light,
the cool breezes and especially the newlyformed
foliage and blossoms were all
evidence that late spring and early summer
had arrived in Southwest Detroit. In many
ways, what I saw during my walks in the
neighborhoods was in direct contrast
to the ill-informed image I had been
given about this place. Ultimately, both
the well-defined spaces and the homes
attracted me. The homes were what you
would expect from anyone, anywhere who
cared and tended to his or her personal
domain. These were beautiful spaces and,
for Latino immigrants and others, they
reflected both the new world of which they
were now a part, as well as the one that
they had left behind. Southwest Detroit is
approximately 50% Latino and, although
I did not know for certain whether the
homes in my photographs belonged to
Latino immigrants, there were clues:
religious and ethnic iconography and
statuary as well as Mexican flags were
commonly displayed. Southwest Detroit
is a vibrant oasis teeming with life and
this was simply a beautiful time to explore
these neighborhoods.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
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Homes of Southwest Detroit 1, 2, and 3
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The Rouge, Steel Worker No.7
I refer to these photographic images
as “pedestrian views” because they are
literally points of view that anyone would
see with feet on the ground and eyes wideopen.
I met and talked with many people
along the way, and they were friendly and
gracious. I soon began to feel as if I were
at home.
MM: You’ve stated that you have done no
“long-term, serious work” in color. Please
explain your choice of black and white
photography - aesthetic or thematic.
CD: When this statement was made, it
was true. During my undergraduate
years, much of the work that moved
me - that I connected with and that
initially triggered a serious interest
in photography - was black and white.
Although this began to change in the
1970s, color photography had not been
the choice of serious art photographers.
Beyond that, when the subject and intent
are compatible, I have worked in and
continue to work in black and white. When
you strip away the color layer from the
subject and record it in shades of gray, you
are further interpreting, transforming,
and translating the subject. Now,
because of the popularity of digital
cameras and the proliferation of
photographic images in our culture,
black and white images are seen as exotic,
historic, and antique. When I now use
black and white, I do so because of its
inherent separation from reality and from
the present. There is an immediacy with
color; color is the here and now.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
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Clockwise L to R: The Rouge, Above Storage Bins, From Transfer Crane, No.9; The Rouge, From the Transfer Crane, Looking West Over
Boat Slip, No.8; The Rouge, Looking Southeast to Blast Furnances A and B, No.5; The Rouge, Looking South Along the Highline, No.1.
Aside from the color assignment work that
I did as a student, I began to use color for
the first time in 2010 when I began the
Beyond Borders: Latino Immigrants
and the Homes of Southwest Detroit
project. As I recounted earlier, during the
summers I began taking walks through
the neighborhoods of southwest Detroit.
Initially, I was attracted to the lush
late spring foliage and the rich colors. I
responded not to a feeling of history or
nostalgia, but to the immediacy of where I
was and what I saw. I became absorbed by
my surroundings at that moment.
In 2012, I began making photographs for
a new body of work, Rouge: The Legacy of
Detroit and the Autoworkers. Through a
friend, I met an individual who was able
to secure complete and total access to the
old Ford Rouge Complex, now owned by
Severstal. This was an exceptionally rare
opportunity. In the past, I, as well as many
others, had tried for years to gain access
with no success. I began printing these
images in black and white and, when I
showed them to friends and colleagues
for feedback, I received very favorable
comments. In time, as I continued to look
at and think about the images and, after
reading about and spending more time
with Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry
murals, I realized that the images in
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The Rouge, Steel Workers Glove
black and white seemed to be anchored
in the past, and were not compatible with
my interest in and intent for my subject.
I also worried that they would only be
seen as “historic documents.” These new
images of the Rouge were not made in an
attempt to look backward, but instead, to
represent this post-industrial cathedral
in the present as well as to recognize
the importance of the laborer in the
automobile manufacturing industry.
The second part of this Rouge series will
consist of environmental portraits of
retired Rouge workers in their homes.
Before I photograph, I’ll audiotape
interviews with the workers about their
past experiences working at the Rouge.
In this instance, I have chosen to make
traditional documentary portraits in
black and white.
So, to address your question, the choice
between black and white or color is not
conditioned by “aesthetics” but rather by
subject matter, concept, and intent. In the
end, I must determine which of the two is
more compatible. ■
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
1 A. D. Coleman, Depth of Field (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1998), 64.
2 Cf. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New
York: Guilford Press, 1997), 94.
3 Juan Felipe Herrera, quoted in The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-
Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature, ed. Lauro Flores (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1998), 3.
Ezrahi, Yaron, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard P. Segal, ed.
Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism. Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1994.
Fiedler, Jeannine. Photography at the Bauhaus. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1990.
Flores, Lauro, ed. The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of
U.S. Hispanic Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1998.
The following bibliography, by no means
exhaustive, consists of works important to
Carlos Diaz.
Arnhem, Rudolf. The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in
the Visual Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. New York:
The Guilford Press, 1997.
Jean, Marcel, ed. The Autobiography of Surrealism. New York:
Marlowe & Company, 1952.
Cabadas, Joseph P. River Rouge: Ford’s Industrial Colossus. St.
Paul: Motor Books, 2004.
Chomsky, Aviva. “They Take Our Jobs” and Twenty Other Myths
about Immigration. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.
Coleman, A.D. Depth of Field. Alburqueque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1998.
Cummings, Frederick J. The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the
Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera. Detroit: Detroit Institute
of Arts, 1978.
Jay, Ricky. Jay’s Journal of Anomalies. New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 2001.
Miller, Dennis. Photography’s Multiple Roles: Art, Document,
Market, Science. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Photography,
Chicago, 1998.
Postman, Neil. Technology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Stebbins, Jr., Theodore E. and Norman Keyes, Jr. Charles Sheeler:
The Photographs. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1987.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on
Photographic History, Institutions and Practices. Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis, 2003.
Urrea, Louis A. The Devil’s Highway. New York: Little, Brown &
Company, 2004.
Valdes, Dennis N. El Pueblo Mexicano en Detroit y Michigan: A
Social History. Self-published, 1982.
Wells, Liz. Photography: A Critical Introduction. New York:
Routledge, 2000.
Wells, Liz. The Photography Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.
/ Research
Durozoi, Gérard. History of the Surrealist Movement. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Zolberg, Aristide R. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the
Fashioning of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
172/173
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
3 Detroit
/Drawing
/ Research
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
DRAWING DETROIT
(ITER ATION #2)
/ Curated by Ryan Harte & Jennifer Junkermeier
Illustration from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961,
Vintage Books p. 181 depicting multiple routes to a destination.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
People move around a city using a variety of vehicles
and modes of transportation: car, bus, bike and
foot; freeways, surface streets, bike lanes and
sidewalks. Moreover, besides the chosen mode of
transportation is the choice in pathway, based on any number
of factors. Moving from point A to B presents innumerable
possibilities on how to travel between spaces, providing a
diversity of cities, each lying within the same city, from
street to street, thoroughfare to thoroughfare. In an analysis
of navigating a neighborhood, Jane Jacobs describes the
multiplicity of routes available to reach a destination, especially
along short blocks (The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, 1961, Vintage Books). For Jacobs, the variety of routes
is important to activate all parts of the neighborhood, bringing
liveliness, diversity, the safety of “eyes on the street” among
other benefits. As individuals inhabit and navigate a unique
experience of our shared city, one’s chosen route can bring insight
into how one feels about a city and how one understands a city.
To better explore and share the varying ways different individuals
experience the same city, for this iteration of Drawing Detroit
for Detroit Research we developed a set of prompts (questions
and scenarios) with the goal of finding a way for people to provide
personal insight into the way they experience Detroit. We invited
a group of people to respond in the form of a hand-drawn map with
an emphasis on experimental articulation. We asked participants
the following: When creating your map, we'd like you to share
your unique "insider" knowledge of how you understand and
navigate your neighborhood. Particularly, what information
can be conveyed in a hand-drawn map that GPS navigation
won't reveal? The choice in path is of particular interest because
it is a subtle reflection of one’s view of a city as well as the
structural impact of the city on an individual. These routing
decisions are sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious:
influenced by convenience, perceived threats, routine, as
well as other factors. Moreover, hand-drawn maps provide an
opportunity above an atlas or contemporary GPS navigation
in that they can reveal intimate knowledge of a neighborhood.
Consider the following questions when thinking about
hand-drawn maps: What are the local landmarks in your
neighborhood? What shortcuts do you take to get home from
work? Where or what route do you walk your dog? If you ride
a bike around town, which streets are bike friendly? Or, what
is the most bike friendly route to work for you? Where do you
always look for parking in specific neighborhoods? What is
your scenic route home from work? What route do you take for
experiencing your perfect day in the city of Detroit? Where
do you walk? Where do you jog? What is the route to your
favorite restaurant from your home? What do you encounter
on your way that always makes you smile or makes you angry?
A rich understanding of Detroit is the amalgamation of individual
insights of the city. As our individual paths are “mixed and
mingled with one another” (Jacobs, Great American Cities,
180), to truly understand a city would necessitate knowing each
of its constituencies; to know and understand our neighbors.
When we first started to think what these maps may reveal we
thought it would be about specific roads and physical movement.
To our surprise, what we found was that within the “maps” were
histories, feelings, experiences and representations of Detroit
/Drawing Detroit
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
that could and should warrant further investigation. Equally
interesting in the “maps” people created were how reflective
they were of their own existence, their own personalities. The
project had/has no goal of unearthing any grand conclusion.
Instead the maps are documents; archiving a time, place and
existence within it. Apart from revealing intimate knowledge
of a neighborhood, these maps are a guide and invitation
to experience another person’s understanding of a shared
city. These maps are a launching point to new conversations
with buildings, trees, shops, people, and ways of life.
For example, M. Saffell Gardner’s map depicts a timeline of
his studio spaces, past and present, throughout the city. Some
of the spaces no longer exist, lost when the buildings were torn
down. The second graders from Mrs. Turner’s class drew idyllic
maps full of high-rise buildings. Alex Hill depicts a Detroit of
bubble neighborhoods, the Arts Center, Cass Corridor, and
Livernois Ave. separated by vast, still untraveled expanses.
Such a variety of ways to inhabit the same space reflects the rich
diversity in heritage, age, and personality of the people of Detroit.
Technological power and smartphone ubiquity has brought GPS
navigation to cars, bikes and public transportation—delivering
the quickest or shortest route. As reliance upon hand-drawn
maps or simple written directions wanes, the document of the
map serves an important auxiliary function in telling a great deal
about the how we exist in the city at that time, reflecting thoughts
and behaviors. Partly a time capsule, maps have a special
quality in their ability to imbed knowledge of a place and a time.
As a practical object, missing a turn with a simple handdrawn
map could easily leave the traveler lost. GPS alleviates
the inconvenience of unexpected construction detours or rerouting
after a missed turn. As the technology is designed to
provide the quickest or shortest route, it does not know how
to show the “scenic route.” By contrast, directions delivered
by hand were often simplified to involve less turns. Handdirections
account for convenience, can incorporate useful
shortcuts or explaining tricky turns. GPS at once reduces
inconvenience but also routinely delivers the same routes to
a destination. Obligingly following GPS navigation restricts
serendipitous discovery of neighborhoods, even a street or
two over. The next time you are on your way to a destination,
leave early and consider a detour. Or, ask a friend for a map.
The people we invited to create “maps” for the project were
members from our immediate community, friends and colleagues,
made up of artists, writers and educators each with unique
experiences and perspectives on Detroit. The following maps were
created by ‘jide Aje, Halima Cassells, Clara DeGalan, Stephen
Garrett Dewyer, M. Saffell Gardner, Alex B. Hill, and Mrs. Turner's
2nd Grade Class from Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit. ■
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
‘jide Aje is a Detroit based artist who was born in Lagos, Nigeria.
His main forte is painting. Aside from being an exhibited creator,
he is an active member and supporter of numerous arts and
cultural organizations and creative initiatives in Detroit.
Halima Cassells is a Detroit based artist/community advocate.
She assumes leadership and outreach roles at O.N.E. Mile,
Oakland Avenue Artists Coalition, Incite Focus Fab Lab, North
End Soup, Center for Community Based Enterprise, Detroit Black
Community Food Security Network and the Free Market of Detroit.
Clara DeGalan is an artist, writer and educator based
in Detroit where she was born and raised. In addition
to her studio and writing practice, she teaches at
Wayne State University and Madonna University.
Alex B. Hill is a Project Coordinator and Community Health
Worker who lives and works in Detroit. His projects and research
focus on the need for greater community involvement in
development and specifically highlights the intersections of
power, privilege, and race in regards to health disparities, access
to basic health care, and the social implications of medicine.
Mrs. Turner's 2nd Grade Class from Nataki Talibah
Schoolhouse of Detroit. Mrs. Turner (aka Alyson Jones) is
an educator, writer, philosopher and founder of Searching
for Telos: Philosophy for Children. She is a native of
Detroit who in her spare time assists her family at Source
Booksellers in its mission to make the Literary Arts Visible.
/Drawing Detroit
Stephen Garrett Dewyer is a Detroit based artist, writer and
part-time professor. He is the co-founding editor of Infinite
Mile: a journal of art + culture(s) in Detroit. He received an
M.F.A. in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art
in 2011 and a B.F.A. in Art History, Theory & Criticism in
2008 from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
M. Saffell Gardner is a Detroit based artist, art historian, curator
and educator. He holds B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in painting
from Wayne State University and is a 2015 Kresge Fellow.
178/179
DetroitResearch /On Dance
1. 'jide Aje, Hand-drawn Map, Detroit, 2015
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/Drawing Detroit
2. Halima Cassells, Hand-drawn Map, Detroit, 2015
180/181
DetroitResearch /On Dance
3. Clara DeGalan, Hand-drawn Map, Detroit, 2015
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Hart Plaza and Woodward Avenue
Martin Luther King Boulevard and Woodward Avenue
Warren Avenue and Woodward Avenue
/Drawing Detroit
Grand Boulevard and Woodward Avenue
Chicago Boulevard and Woodward Avenue
M-8 Davison and Woodward Avenue
McNichols Road and Woodward Avenue
7 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
8 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
9 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
10 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
11 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
12 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
13 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
14 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue
Maple Road and Woodward Avenue
4. Stephen Garrett Dewyer, Hand-drawn Map, Detroit, 2015
182/183
5. M. Saffell Gardner, Hand-drawn Map, Detroit, 2015
DetroitResearch /On Dance
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/Drawing Detroit
6. Alex B. Hill, Hand-drawn Map, Detroit, 2015
184/185
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
7. Mrs. Turner's 2nd Grade Class from Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, 9 Hand-drawn Maps, Detroit, 2015
/Drawing Detroit
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
4
/Public
Engagement
/ Research
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
/CURTIS MCGUIRE
St. Louis County police responding to the Ferguson Uprising after
white officer Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown, a young
black man, Nov. 24th 2014, Ferguson, MO
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
My role in St. Louis and Ferguson was that of a National
Lawyers Guild Legal Observer (NLG-LO). As a practice,
NLG-LOs only become involved when a request is
presented from members of a community. The purpose of a legal
observer is to be witness to the activities of law enforcement
organizations and how law enforcement treats people during
the engagement of constitutionally protected free speech. We
document any violations of human rights or violence by law
enforcement and turn over that documentation to NLG attorneys.
That evidence is then used to protect protestors who face charges
for engaging in free speech.
What I saw in St. Louis and in Ferguson was a systematically
racist society doing its best to squash a rebellion of its most
disenfranchised black youth who even now continue to fight
against the perpetual threat of death for having the audacity to
have been born black. Between August and November, 2014
I made periodic visits to the St. Louis area, primarily as a legal
observer, but filling in however I was needed.
November and No True Bill
On November 24th word spread quickly as media reported that
a decision about whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson would
be made public at that night at 8 p.m. I spent several hours of
the afternoon delivering warm winter gear to activist hubs around
the area. The tone in the homes of activists that I met was tense
and there was a lot of silence while the reality of the moment
sank in. People considered what was going to happen if Darren
Wilson was not indicted. People prepared to go out in the street
regardless of the grand jury’s decision. They readied themselves
for a long night.
Nick Klaus, a third year law student from Wayne State University
who had traveled there with me, watched the prosecutor make
the announcement on television from the Legal Hub. To no one’s
surprise, the news that Darren Wilson had gotten away with
murder was made official. We were deployed to West Florissant
Street. We always took a buddy with us while working as a legal
observer. Nick was mine. Ferguson sounded like a war zone that
night. Frequent gunshots rang out from all sides near our location.
Some sounded much closer than others. On West Florissant
Street riot police were scattered all around in small groups. Things
began peacefully but rapidly turned violent. When the illegal
expropriation and destruction of property began every cop in
sight retreated and left for at least twenty minutes, during which
outraged citizens threw rocks through a McDonalds’ windows
and a Bank of America ATM was pummeled with a sledgehammer.
A MetroPCS cell phone store, a beauty salon, a liquor store, a
storage unit office building, and several other structures were set
ablaze. When the police returned they pushed people back until a
fire truck could reach the MetroPCS store. Firefighters attempted
to put the fire out, but as the gunshots got closer to that location
the firefighters pulled out, leaving the National Guard and St. Louis
County officers to watch the buildings crumble in flames. Once the
fire trucks were gone, the police started to move their formation,
pushing protestors further east on West Florissant Street. I went
to move my car to ensure that I could leave when the time was
ripe. I had an exit strategy, but it relied on my car being accessible.
I pulled out and moved it a few blocks up. During the walk back
I was surrounded by gunfire. People were pointing their firearms
into the air or the ground as I passed. I purposely avoided looking
at faces. A gun blasted off a shot not five feet from me. I dropped
to the ground as I heard three men laugh as they warned me to
be careful. I thanked them and kept walking back to my group,
/Public Engagement
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Curtis McGuire, St. Louis County police responding to the Ferguson Uprising after white officer Darren Wilson murdered
Michael Brown, a young black man, Nov. 24th 2014, Ferguson, MO. Images courtesy of the artist
The night the Non-Indictment of Darren Wilson was announced.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
feeling that not taking my buddy with me had been a big mistake.
I never once felt at risk of being hurt by protesters. My only source
of fear was the police.
We stayed as long as we thought we were needed. Then we
redeployed to the Shaw neighborhood. We had heard reports of
police cars having been lit on fire there. We arrived as fast as
we could and touched base with a few folks already there. We
headed for Mokabe’s coffee house, which we’d been told had
been surrounded by police. Upon our arrival we heard from
activists there that they had been tear gassed not too long ago. It
was calm for the moment. We went inside to get a cup of coffee
and warm up a little. The owner of Mokabe’s had opened the
doors as a safe space for the community. It had medic stations,
charging stations, and free coffee for all who came through its
doors. Seeing commotion, I went outside and almost as soon
as I’d walked out the tear gas came down. I got a full dose. I
couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, and everything burned. Mucus
drained from my sinuses. Everyone around me was running and
screaming. The gas had been aimed at the Mokabes’ private
patio where all the protestors had been gathered. As everyone ran
for the door to get inside, the gas followed, filling the front room.
People poured into the back and out into the alleyway. Following
the group, we cut through the kitchen space and, barely able to
see, I found a sink and stuck my face under the cold running water.
It didn’t help much.
the right of the building was a staircase leading to a flat above. I
climbed the stairs and sat above the lingering smoke. I loosened
the Velcro that fastened my flak jacket and let my entire body relax
for just a minute. I gathered myself. My eyes continued to hurt, but
I could finally see. I headed back down to the basement to find
my buddy and get him to come outside for a minute to scope the
scene out with me. He and I went back into the alleyway. A white
police van halted at the alleyway access and opened its sliding
door. Inside three riot police officers sat with weapons aimed
directly at us and opened fire without warning. We ran like hell. We
had no idea what type of ammunition was being used against us.
We didn’t wait to find out. We ran back inside the back door and
I watched from a small window as more smoke filled the alleyway
where I had been standing seconds before. There had only been
six or seven people in the alleyway with me and everyone made
it inside uninjured.
After a short while, a sizable chunk of the law enforcement left. We
returned to the alleyway to collect the smoke canisters and rubber
bullets (red marble-sized plastic balls with a white powder on the
inside, which I think was for weight). We posted ourselves in front
of the coffee shop. Most of the law enforcement had departed, as
had many of the protestors. At 4:00 a.m. there were several other
legal observers still around and we decided it was time to get a
little sleep. We got back to our beds at about 5:00 a.m. I was
asleep by 5:30 a.m.
/Public Engagement
When we got to the alleyway the police were waiting and more
tear gas came from over the building and perhaps elsewhere. This
caused more panic and everyone ran inside and down into the
coffee shop’s basement. I waited there for ten minutes. I needed
air and was panicking a little. I went back out into the alley. To
This is an excerpt from a longer piece I wrote for the National
Lawyers Guild Review in early 2015, you can find it in its
entirety online here: https://www.nlg.org/sites/default/files/
NLGRev%2071-4%20final.pdf
192/193
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
5
/Notes on
Social
/ Research
Practice
194/195
DetroitResearch /On Dance
BUILDING ON “NOTES ON
SOCIAL PR ACTICE”:
ON THE THEORETICAL
UNCONSCIOUS OF SOCIAL
PRACTICE
/Hammam Aldouri
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
“[Pragmatism] thinks of praxis not as
something concealing a complexity of
movements, but as a cold, naked concept
of the real, with the density of a stone.”
- Henri Lefebvre 1
In the first issue of Detroit Research, Michael Stone-Richards
correctly identifies the distinct, constitutive dimension of recent
theoretical conceptions of “social practice”: they have “not
yet settled on a self-understanding.” The following critical
reflections attempt to participate in the on-going discourse
of the possibilities of such a “self-understanding.” As this
discourse is, I believe, very much at the initial stages of its
development, my contribution will provide some preliminary
reflections on Stone-Richards’ underscoring of a crucial aspect
of social practice, namely, what he refers to as the “ethic of
care.” I would like to propose a critical reconstruction of the
socio-political unconscious that mobilizes the polyvalent nature
of social practice. I want to suggest that instead of signalling
an ethic of care, recent social art practices can be understood
more precisely as being fully committed to what we could call
a post-philosophical pragmatism of change. In order to begin
to make sense of this, a recent formulation of the meaning and
significance of social practice is worth quoting:
[S]ocial practice can loosely be described as
art that involves more people than objects,
whose horizon is social and political change –
some would even claim that it is about making
another world possible. Social practice concerns
works with multiple faces turned in different
directions – towards specific groups of people,
political questions, policy problems, or artistic
concerns; there is an aesthetic to organization,
a composition to meetings, and choreography
to events, as well as a lot of hands-on work with
people. At the core of social practice is the urge to
reformulate the traditional relationship between
the work and the viewer, between production and
consumption, sender and receiver. Furthermore,
social practice tends to feel more at home outside
traditional art institutions, though is not entirely
foreign to them. 2
As Stone-Richards obliquely implies in his “Notes on Social
Practice,” such “loose” definitions are, in some sense,
symptomatic of the emergence of an uncritical discourse of
“self-understanding.” Notwithstanding the more fluid and open
description of social practice, the central orientation seems to
be absolutely unequivocal: changing the world. Social practice
is orientated by the attempt to change society and political
reality in such a way as to give way to “another world.” It does
not, however, want to produce “representations” or “illusions”
of changes, which simply reflect the image of another possible
reality. Rather, it tries to bring about changes in reality itself. 3
When art is mobilized by the necessity to bring about direct
change in social reality itself, it performs nothing less that
the radical suspension of critique as a constitutive feature of
contemporary art practice, that is, a suspension of reflection on
the conditions of art and the reality in which it exists.
/Notes on Social Practice
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Social practice art is a distinctively post-critical artistic
standpoint in that it demands an overthrow of the impotent
practice of endlessly disclosing the limits of forms of social
reality; a critical standpoint, as is well known, requires the
requisite amount of distance to observe. 4 Such an analytical
distancing and politically problematic withdrawal from social
reality is an effect of the renewed energy for a direct engagement
with reality as it actually is, that is, in the here and now. Art
must, above all else, resist resignation to a self-enclosed position
of endless reflection, counter-reflection and self-reflection,
completely oblivious to the dynamic transformations of social
and political life. It needs to roll its sleeves up (“hands-on
work”) and immerse itself in the concrete realities that affect
specific social groups (often dispossessed and disenfranchised)
at specific times and in specific places. 5 The corollary to this
is, I believe, unequivocal: art practice must not become
philosophical. 6
Before we consider the withdrawal of art practice from
philosophy, let us attend to art’s relation to “direct engagement.”
The rhetoric of “change by direct engagement” is, within the
context of art, nothing new. More precisely, it is the shift in
concern from art as an articulation of the “aesthetics of eternal
beauty” to a strategy of socio-political engagement mediated
by specific places and during specific times in which the very
notion of “art” is radically contested that is in no way novel.
Recall, for example, thesis 49 of Guy Debord and Gianfranco
Sanguinetti’s presentation of the “real split” at the heart of
the Situationist International during the early 1970s: “The SI
never presented itself as a model of revolutionary organisation,
but as a specific organisation that devoted itself in a particular
period to specific tasks.” 7 The sense of the SI’s engagement to
“a particular period” gives the appearance that it foregrounds
and anticipates recent conceptions of social practice. And yet, a
decisive distinction between Debord’s formulation in the early
1970s and the recent formulations of social practice is that the SI
was self-reflexively developed in conjunction with the historical
emergence, maturation, and deflation of particular historical
events, especially the 1954-62 Algerian War of Independence
and May 1968. 8
Debord’s formulation in the 1970s is, accordingly, retrospective.
Contemporary social practice, however, does not sustain its
identity with recourse to a particular historical moment in that
it is unfolding in relation to a reality that it does not need to
historicize (due to dominant cultural practices that presume that
life is properly post-historical). 9 This withdrawal from history
brings into sharp relief the important distinction between art
practices of the last twenty years and the historical avant-garde:
the adumbrated “self-understanding” of contemporary social
practice, as a “network” of strategies of the transformation
of culturally received notions (such as “work,” “audience,”
“production,” “consumption,” etc.), is a belated symptomatic
effect of the de-regulated conditions of advanced, post-industrial
capitalism. This is not the real problem though. The problem
is that socially engaged practice does not recognize itself as “a
belated symptomatic effect.” Conceptions of social practice are
not looking back. They are not constructing their own historical
narrative (this is no doubt why “movement” as a descriptive
term is strategically avoided – “movement” is, in some sense,
a periodizing category).
This lack of self-recognition is devastating: the “politics of
change” at the core of social practice is fully mediated by the
realities of – in the UK – increasingly abdicating governmental
policies focused on public care, public investment and social
responsibility; and – in the US – within a context of the
clear division of government responsibilities (protecting the
inviolable “natural rights” of the individual) and independence
from governmental mediation (protecting the “civil rights”
of the individual’s needs). In both contexts, the alignment of
contemporary art practices with “do-it-yourself” increasingly
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
dominates cultural production: in the British context,
individuals need to do-it-themselves as the government will
no longer provide support (do-it-yourself transforms into fendfor-yourself
); and in the American context, individuals must
continue to “realize themselves” (by “doing-it-themselves”)
under conditions and effects of increasingly hostile and unstable,
market-led competition (all in the name of a ‘pursuit of happiness’
that presupposes as its most fundamental basis the actuality
via identification of its “literary” character, and second by
challenging its pretention as a discourse on some mystical
“absolute truth.” Philosophy is, consequently, organized by two
underlying assumptions: (1) the “urge to escape the finitude of
time and space” and (2) “the search for some final vocabulary,
which can be somehow known in advance to be the common
core, the truth of, all the other vocabularies which might be
advanced in its place.” 13
of equality). 10
The consequence of this reduction of philosophy is clear: it is
A post-critical art practice then constitutes an art practice that
no longer reflects on the reality conditions of its own possibility.
It fails, consequently, to reflect on the reproduction of the very
conditions of its form and logic of production. In our case here,
the basic reflection of the politics of, one could say, “self-care,” is
the hegemonic cultural practice of “entrepreneurship” and “DIY
culture” at the level of the determination of social reality itself.
In lieu of the dissolution of ‘critique’ as a theoretical orientation,
social art practice reactively turns to post-philosophical
pragmatism in its journey of self-understanding. 11
To state that “post-philosophical pragmatics” is the theoretical
unconscious of dominant, contemporary Anglo-American
cultural practices is, I believe, not without some justification. 12
The centrality of pragmatism is, in part, mobilized by a cultural
politics distinctively oppositional to what is putatively identified
as “continental philosophy.” The decisive orientation of
continental philosophy finds its most general co-ordinates
in a philosophical tradition committed to the articulation of
metaphysical truth, which is to say, a commitment to thinking the
eternal, immutable, objective, absolute idea, or the fundamental
reason and essence of reality as such. From out of the quagmire
of metaphysical discourses of “ends” (of man, history, thought
etc.), pragmatism rises as a real alternative to negotiating the
concrete crises and problems that punctuate contemporary
life. It does this by first elaborating the impasse of philosophy
nothing but a fanciful discourse that narcissistically indulges
itself in the “problem” of its own self-legitimation as a selfsufficient
discipline, totally in blind of the fact that sociohistorical
reality has moved on and philosophy as a discourse
on truth is no longer needed (science gives us the truths we need).
For the pragmatist, philosophy is a thing of the past. This of
course means that it no longer has any direct effect or import
on our daily existence. 14
In place of this eradication of philosophy’s pretences, pragmatic
action performs a kind of revivified “return” to finite and
actual reality, that is, to the concrete, immediate present
(the here and now). This has allowed pragmatism to become
a one-dimensional ‘crisis management’ tool offered by the
sector of the professionalization of post-philosophical theory;
bureaucratic institutions such as municipal governments
increasingly take recourse to such tools whenever real, complex
social problems arise. Pragmatism boils social problems down
to their most elementary units, thus covering over the complex
network of inter-related issues that constitute a problem. This
distillation allows bodies such as the above-mentioned municipal
governments to act “swiftly” and “efficiently” (which often
simply means the rapid pacification of a tense situation).
As I have suggested above, this post-philosophical pragmatism
has permeated the cultural arena of art theory and practices.
/Notes on Social Practice
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
The most accomplished articulation of a post-philosophical
pragmatist conception of social practice can perhaps be found
in the work of Grant H. Kester. Most notably, it is the notion
of “dialogical practice” that expresses Kester’s pragmatism.
According to Kester, dialogical practice can be comprehended
in the following way:
In dialogical practice the artist, whose perceptions
are informed by his or her own training, past
projects, and lived experience, comes into a
given site or community characterized by its own
unique constellation of social and economic forces,
personalities, and traditions. In the exchange that
follows, both the artist and his or her collaborators
will have their existing perceptions challenged;
the artist may well recognize relationships or
connections that the community members have
become incurred to, while the collaborators will
also challenge the artist’s preconceptions about
the community itself and about his or her own
function as an artist. What emerges is a new
set of insights, generated at the intersection of
both perspectives and catalysed through the
collaborative production of a given project. 15
Taken in isolation, this overly schematic and abstract definition
of dialogical practice is, considering the artistic legacies Kester
attends to, striking for a number of reasons, the first of which
being that it is configured as a specifically meta-art practice in
which both artist and collaborator are subject to its mechanism
and logic of production. Another striking characteristic of
Kester’s definition is its focus on “the change in the perception”
of culturally received notions central to art discourse, and not the
“change of society” (as noted above). The corollary to this is worth
underscoring: Kester’s discourse on dialogical practice is one in
which the social relations (between artist and collaborator) that
render it meaningful are stripped of their sociality in so far as
what counts, and what is most significant, is the transformation
of perception, and not the social relations themselves. This
definition of dialogical practice elides the deeper orientation
Kester wants to draw out, namely that dialogical practice is
more precisely the diffuse “set of positive practices directed
toward the world beyond gallery walls, linking new forms of
intersubjective experience with social or political activism.” 16
Without this connection to the social practice of “activism,”
Kester’s conception of dialogical practice is in fear of falling
too readily into the history of avant-garde art practices, which,
according to Kester, amounts to falling into a mode of practice
that is too instrumentally mobilized by notions of aesthetic
“shock” and “defamiliarization.” 17 The practice of aesthetic
“shock” is too negative of a procedure in so far as it maintains
a certain division between artist and viewer (the “shocker”
and the “shocked” if you will). In avant-garde practices, the
“negotiation of difference” between these subjectivities remains
suspended in such a way that the difference is not reconciled
and sublated. 18 From this standpoint, avant-garde practices
are seen as deepening the experience of alienation in modern
existence, whereas dialogical practices are orientated by the
belief that, within specific spaces and times, alienation can be
negotiated and overcome. Put more simply, dialogical practices
are orientated by the belief that, in the face of a radically
depoliticized and cynical cultural politics of social inertia, art
can change the world in reality itself. 19
The important point to underscore here is the notion of the
substitution of “politics” by “art” under conditions in which
political engagement no longer functions as a dominant cultural
practice (the “depoliticizing” effect of living in advanced
capitalist society). The supposed “politicization” of art, in
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
light of the fundamental lack of a concrete social subject of
historical change, is revivified by the commitment to directly
engage the immediately apprehended socio-political realities
of the here and now. 20 The pragmatic “re-politicization” of art
is grounded on what one could call it’s “presentism,” namely,
the positivist, pre-critical assumption of art’s connection with
the cultural present as an undifferentiated and self-contained
temporal phenomenon that can simply be grasped in its totality
at any given moment. 21 What is crucial in Kester’s examples
of dialogical practices is that the “change of the world in
reality itself” is demonstrated empirically (WochenKlausur
set up a safe-house for sex-workers with drug-addiction). This
rehabilitation of art’s “empirical demonstrability” is, finally,
what reveals the pragmatist orientation of social practice
(since an art that remains caught within the constraints of
merely speculative conceptions of a future world to come fail
to take proper notice to the exigency of activist change). With
its empirical reflection, pragmatist art practice rings the final
death knell on critique.
The constitutive gesture of recent socially engaged art practices
is their affirmation, immediate and non-critical confrontation
and engagement with the reality of the present. Consequently,
any critique of the reality conditions of the social phenomena
of the present (art being one such phenomenon) is completely
dissimulated. The affirmation of the immediacy of the present
results in tacitly ratifying and idealizing the reality conditions
that determine the subjectivities that dialogical practices
underscore and attempt to negotiate and reconfigure. To put
this another way: a pragmatic transformation of the present
amounts to the reproduction of what allows us to immediately
identify a temporal entity called the “present” in which we
subsequently “recognize” certain issues and problems that need
our “urgent care.” 22 ■
/Notes on Social Practice
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1 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London and New York:
Verso, 2014), 528.
2 Maria Lind, “Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice,” in Living
as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson
(New York: Creative Time Books, 2012), 49.
3 The following observations take recourse to Boris Groys, ‘On Art
Activism,’ e-flux, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-art-activism.
Accessed 04-25-16.
4 From the standpoint of socially engaged art, what is putatively
understood as “institutional critique” is nothing but, to use one
of Jacques Rancière’s most oft used expressions, a “discourse of
impotence.”
5 I will discuss the notion of a “given site” in the accompanying essay
“Building on ‘Notes on Social Practice’ (2): Critical Reflections on
the Construction of a Concept,” forthcoming, Detroit Research, vol.
3 (Spring 2017).
6 Critique is understood here as a pre-eminently philosophical
concept and method, finding its most accomplished articulation in
Kant’s transcendental philosophy and the legacy of German
Idealism.
7 Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, The Real Split in the
International (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 64.
8 Significantly, Kester suggests that the emergence of socially
engaged art is in part a reflection of the September 11 attacks in
2001. It must be stressed, however, that Kester only suggests this,
which is to say, he does provide a coherent historical and
conceptual analysis of the relation. Cf. Grant H Kester, Conversation
Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2004), 1.
9 If anything, as Stone-Richards alludes, social practice lacks
historical sense (this is why it is yet to understand itself). The
problem is: what are the conditions of possibility of constructing
a historical narrativity under the reality conditions of a life that is
increasingly bombarded with the radical destruction of historical
narrativity?
10 A note about the immediate distinction between the UK and the US:
The politics of “independence” in the UK is troubling, to say the
least, since it is mobilized within a context of a dissolution and
privatization of institutes of social welfare, the liquidation of the
National Health Service being the most immediately recognized
example (note also the recent dissolution of the Independent
Living Fund, which was mandated to support the UK's 18,000 most
heavily disabled individuals to live independently). In the US, the
dominant “antinomy” of discourse around notions of social care
and welfare concerns to what extent it should be implemented
(we all remember the Federal government shutdown of 2013). From
the standpoint of conservative politics, the argument usually goes
back to the distinction made by the acolytes of the “founding
fathers” between what is “man’s nature” and what are his “needs.”
In that the founding fathers tried to establish a clear articulation
of the essential separation between the individual’s “natural
rights” and his “political rights” (which require some defending
precisely because they are not natural), social welfare is summarily
dispatched as something that does not concern the government’s
necessity to uphold “natural” rights. For a burlesque defence of the
founding fathers on this point of the division of “nature” and “need,”
see Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Fathers: Race, Sex, Class and
Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
2001).
11 Claire Bishop completely overlooks the pragmatist core of socially
engaged practice even though she polemically draws attention to
it (at least minimally by the invocation of the term). Bishop’s lack
of a sustained conceptual development of pragmatism is a
symptom of her focus on the problem of the supposed ‘ethical turn’
of socially engaged art. Cf. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells:
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and
New York: Verso, 2012), 26.
12 I stress the geopolitical restriction of pragmatism for two reasons:
first, a substantial part of recent positive conceptions of social
practice emerge in North America; second, the theoretical shift of
philosophical thought from being centred on the problem of the
“end of metaphysics” to a “post-metaphysical” theoretical practice
plays out as a geopolitical migration of ideas from continental
Europe to the trans-Atlantic Anglo-American world.
13 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays 1972-1980)
(Brighton: The Harvest Press, 1982), xix and xlii. Consider also:
“Pragmatists hold that there are no metaphysical guarantees to be
had that even our most firmly-held beliefs will never need revision.”
Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995), 21.
14 Most of us in advanced capitalist society do not talk about the
“truth” of things within the context of culture. Rather, we speak
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
in terms of plural, subjective perspectives and infinite subjective
opinions (the classical opposition of truth and doxa does not mean
anything for us anymore). Society, at the level of its dominant
cultural formation, largely exhibits a post-philosophical orientation.
15 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 95.
16 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 9.
17 Kester’s conception of dialogical practice can be understood in
terms of representing a para-avant-gardist approach. That is, the
practice shares the socio-political orientations of the historical
avant-garde but it diverges from the central methodologies of
avant-garde practices. Interestingly, Shannon Jackson’s recent
notion of “cross-disciplinary practice,” which recognizes itself
in fidelity to Kester’s orientation, is structured precisely around
the notion of “defamiliarization” (a symptom of her post-Brechtian
position). See Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art,
Supporting Publics (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
18 I am referring here to Kester’s description of “The ROUTES Project”
(2002) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in terms of producing a space
in which “difference [between Republican Catholics and Loyalist
Protestants] were reconciled.” Kester, Conversation Pieces, 8.
19 The relation between dialogical practice and avant-garde practices
is developed, via the notion of collaborative practice, in “Building
on ‘Notes on Social Practice’ (2).”
20 All of Kester’s artistic examples reflect this basic level connection
(of art and the ‘immediate present’): WochenKlausur’s “Intervention
to Aid Drug-Addicted Women”; Suzanne Lacy’s “The Roof is on
Fire”; Littoral Arts, “The ROUTES Project”; The Art of Change,
“West Meets East”; Stephen Willats’ “From One Generation to
Another” and “Brentford Towers”; and Jay Koh “E.T. (Exchanging
Thoughts).”
/Notes on Social Practice
21 For an excellent critical assessment of pragmatism’s “presentism,”
see Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London and New
York: Routledge, 2000), 10-13.
22 I would like to make a note here on my fidelity to thinking through
the question of the ethics of practice as a “practice of freedom”
(as Michel Foucault once put it). My reflections are mobilized by the
attempt to render more precise the theoretical orientation of some
conceptions of socially engaged practices. I think that the category
of “care,” if played out in (1) an ossified antinomical relation to
judgments of “(avant-gardist) art” and (2) without the necessary
critique of its ideological misrepresentation, obfuscates this step
toward a more precise identification.
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
6 /Collections
/ Research
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
IN CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE
VESSEL: THE COLLECTION OF JOY
AND ALLAN NACHMAN
/ ADDIE LANGFORD
/Collections
/ALL PHOTOS COURTESY ADDIE LANGFORD AND CURTIS MCGUIRE FOR DETROIT RESEARCH
Facing: Marie T. Hermann, A Gentle Blow to the Rock, 2013. Stoneware, Lower right, Ed Moulthrop, Tulipwood, Spheroid, 1988.
Above: David Goldburg, Sideboard, 2013, Jang Jin, Porcelain, 2013-2015, Photos courtesy of Addie Langford.
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So long as beauty abides in only a few articles created by a few
geniuses, the Kingdom of Beauty is nowhere near realization.
- Bernard Leach 1
In a talk in February 2016 at Pewabic
Pottery, Anders Ruhwald, curator,
and Artist-in-Residence in the
department of Ceramics at Cranbrook
Academy of Art, toured a group of forty
through seven artists’ variations on
the contemporary ceramic vessel. As
compelling as the new works was the
thought Ruhwald left us with, namely,
that the vessel is one of the few cultural
and material universals, which belongs
to no one and to no one culture. Baskets,
and pots, earth and fiber are the leveling
field of anthropology, and Joy and Allan
Nachman have created a life wrapped
around the exploration of this tradition.
Bernard Leach, who may be said to have
organized the basic modern language and
conceptual repertoire for discussing the
making and appreciation of studio pottery,
refers to the pottery vessel from the T’ang
and Sung periods in China, Japanese
master ware, Syrian, Persian, English,
Delft, German and more, and refers to the
highest grade pots from these far reaching
places as “a completely unified human
expression.” 2 Is this what Joy really means
when she insists she cannot stand fussy, or
flashy? The word Allan uses is authentic.
The wood, fiber, and clay vessels in their
home are not about narrative, or texture,
or the prestige object. They search for the
word, just the right work, to illuminate a
thirty-year fascination with pots. Baskets.
Wooden bowls.
In exploring the vessel collection of
Joy and Allan Nachman, of Bloomfield
Hills, Michigan, I turned to the revered
English potter Bernard Leach who drew
upon ancient traditions for direction and
purpose. 2016 presents art works that
range from robotics, to hologram, back
to farm-to-table and the evaporation of
the object all together in some acts of
social practice or social sculpture. This
evaporation of the object has brought into
question again, albeit in new light, the
meaning and weight of the crafted object.
No longer in need of return to the Art vs
Craft conversation, 3 the craft object has
an even more complicated position, that
lands us somewhere in the long avoided
territory of the spirit, or the spiritual - or
the ritualistic? For anyone who has ever
been aesthetically stopped in her tracks
by a tea bowl, or stared into a potter’s work
like a campfire, you will know that these
circle containers of liquid and meal can
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
feel beyond explanation. Leach has been
the many? Making, in other words, is of
can be no fullness or complete realization
heavily criticized for his taxonomies and
tradition; it is not flashy but authentic.
of utility without beauty, refinement
order-creating language (chapter 1 of A
Nor egoistic, but certainly making must
and charm, for the simple reason that
Potter’s Book is called, after all, “Towards
be reflective (and self-reflexive), or it (the
their absence must in the long run be
a Standard”!), and no more so than by the
pot) is as good as dead. I believe this quiet,
intolerable to both maker and consumer.
English potter, writer, and installation
barely- there resonance of the pot which
We desire not only food, but the zest of
artist Edmund de Waal, 4 but it would be
is invisible to most people (accustomed to
eating.” 7 Leach is making a point about
fairer to acknowledge that Leach moors
faster looking or who have more muscular
the unseen energy transmuted through
himself in such a narrow strip of pottery
motives in their association to art) is the
material, that holding water, for example,
correctness because he was confronted
sensation upon which the Nachmans have
only checks the box of utility – it may be
with the need to make a case for pottery
built their collection. To draw upon Leach,
a container, but not yet a vessel. What is
as art against a reigning narrowness of
taste and sensibility: “Very few people
in this country [England] think of the
making of pottery as an art, and amongst
there is a restrained elegance in the works
in the Nachman collection. In Leach’s
telling, the Japanese revere the qualities
of restraint and that which is subdued and
the passage from container to vessel? How
might this transition be figured or felt and
what might it be in the material and its
organization that triggers responsiveness
/Collections
those few the great majority have no
use a Japanese word, shibui, that has no
in the handler? Leach hammers out (and
criterion of aesthetic values which would
equivalent in English: “It is impossible to
at) these two principles, the ones that
enable them to distinguish between the
translate it satisfactorily into one English
are bedrock to the Nachman aesthetic,
genuinely good and the meretricious.” 5 It
term, ‘austere’, ‘subdued’, ‘restrained’,
principles which bind two ubiquitous and
could, more interestingly, be also argued,
these words come nearest. Etymologically,
complex aspects of living. Here again is
that without these imposed rules - these
shibui means ‘astringent’, and is used to
Leach on the significance of popular or
fictions - of standard to support him, he
describe a profound, unassuming quiet
folk arts, quoting from Soētsu Yanagi
might implode from the poetry of the
feeling.” 6
(“the intellectual leader of the Japanese
vessel. In the quotation from Leach used
craft movement of today” 8 ) on Japanese
as epigraph to this reflection, Leach
In an interesting passage in A Potter’s
handicraft and the role of the anonymous
argues that making is humble and belongs
Book, Leach talks about the maker
origination of form in their development.
to the work of many hands, or maybe to the
imbuing the pot with something a bit
Utility is the first principle of beauty:
every hand, though if you read Leach he is
like a fragrance: My husband returns
far from populist in his views. Still, there
home from an art opening and I can tell
One may ask: what then is the nature of
is a Kingdom of Beauty at hand – beauty
he greeted Marsha M. (Sandalwood). Or,
the beauty which has been discovered by
is eschatological? – and it can only be the
of one of our three whom we call our fairy
these masters? [...] In the first place, it
work of many hands – the communion of
Godmothers - Chanel. Leach says “there
is non-individualistic […] Some of the
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Above: Brad Sells, Long Fluted Cherry Vessel, 2000.
Below: Various wood turned vessels.
Title of the Photo Photo courtesy First Last
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Above: Christian Burchard, Small Treasures, 1996, wood turned vessels.
Below: Various antique and contemporary miniature vessels and carvings.
/Collections
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
most famous tea-bowls were originally
the simplest of utensils in popular use
in Korea or China; many of them were
the rice bowls of Korean peasants. But
the amazingly keen eye of the Cha-noyu
master has discovered in these odd
and neglected pieces a unique beauty;
for what most appeals to him are the
things originally made for everyday use.
In brief, Cha-no-yu may be defined as
an aesthetics of actual living, in which
utility is the first principle of beauty. And
this is why such great significance has
been given to certain articles necessary
for everyday life. 9
The second principle Leach speaks of is
humility, and again he quotes from Soētsu
Yanagi: “The next important aspect of
the works of people’s art is that they are
simple and unassuming […] Indeed Beauty
and Humility border on each other.” 10 If
you’ve spent ten minutes with Joy and
Allan you will not recall hearing them
over a crowd. Elegant. Inquisitive. Even
as we chatter away, the Nachman’s living
room feels quiet, and it is no mystery that
I met Allan at the swimming pool, a place
of meditation, and routine.
Allan speaks of his experience learning
to turn wood with mythic Kentucky wood
turner, Rudy Osolnik, a man who rose
at 4:00am, turning over 100,000 candle
sticks before many sunrises when he
would breakfast with his wife. $12 at a
time, he put his kids through college.
Touching and shaping material and
teaching day in, day out. Until recently
I hadn’t realized the paper-thin wooden
platters on my grandmother’s wall
were Osolnik’s. More about Rudy, later.
Thirty years, collecting bowls. There is
a centering of the space as we move into
conversation. I am witnessing turtle doves
tell their story aloud for the first time and
it is gorgeous.
BIO
Joy Nachman, a third generation native
Detroiter, grew up in Palmer Woods
and pursued education and psychology
in college. In her youth, she enjoyed
drawing, but marks a pivotal trip to Sam
Fields Art School on Wyoming street in
Detroit as an art experience that made
certain things possible, or rather, she
might have gained access to feelings
or a way of accessing thoughts. After
this, art history class at University of
Michigan filled her with images, stories,
and historical connections that made
her an informed guide to her family in
New York one summer while visiting the
Frick Collection. The combination of
this early exposure helped her to think
the Allan Nachman of 1969 was normal,
for seeking out a Picasso to hang on his
fraternity house wall. Allan, also Detroit
born, and University of Michigan
educated, traces his connection to art,
or culture, as he chiseled more closely
to say, to the ever-present opera and
classical music that filled his childhood
home. Surrounded by 78’s and his
parents reverence for music, Allan later
expanded his participation in art from
listening to making, and from making
to looking, and with Joy to collecting.
He was attracted to wood working with
hand tools in a school shop class where a
wooden jewelry box and gavel captured
his imagination. He worked side-byside
with his father, a carpenter, and
developed more than just skills, but a
relationship with material. He spoke
lovingly of this gavel, and it made me
wonder if that was his real gateway to
the Law. And from his mother, he recalls
distinct attention paid to a collection of
Spode cups and saucers. The maternal
and the paternal, presence then, as
distinctive passageways and entries
into the development of sensibility.
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
EARLY ART COLLECTING
their traveling 30 Americans exhibit-
over the Thanksgiving holiday. In tribute,
When Allan was in college, the Ann Arbor
ion, and they were riotous. The inter-
every five years Joy dawns her wedding
Art Fair, now one of the largest in the
familial negotiation of the collecting
gown to serve Thanksgiving dinner. It still
country, put up its first tent. He confused
couple can’t be underestimated as the
fits. Like Tim and Marilyn Mast, featured
friends by collecting figurative paintings
maypole of the aesthetic. Each collected
ceramics collectors in the opening salvo
instead of dormitory schlock. He hung
work has an advocate and it makes for
of Detroit Research, their creative life
the walls of his fraternity with Lyonel
great soap-opera. The must-haves, the
together was creating a domestic space
Feininger prints and again, a Picasso.
over my dead-bodies. Bringing in the
born of modern furniture design. They
“I just wanted to be surrounded by it
offspring for a swing vote. Joy and Allan
moved into a Mies van der Rohe coop on
(art),” Nachman said, and has not
missed an Ann Arbor art fair since. Later,
attending University of Michigan, Allan
took the history of art and symphony
between law. The Nachman’s commitment
established their wrestling terms years
ago and they have their approach down.
My fascination lies in the navigation,
negotiation, and sensitivity toward
each other’s inaudible preferences - the
Nicolet in Detroit and began acquiring
Knoll furniture. Allan laughs and asks
Joy, “Remember the striped couch?”
(I believe a couch launched the Mast
collection as well.) There was a Parsons
/Collections
to music continues through their
zest-meter being highly attuned and
table, a Sarrinen, and Breuer, some
creation and support of Cabaret 313, a
willing to take turns being the one who
of it imitation, some of them original,
Detroit cabaret series.
can’t let go. The collection becomes a
but the environment was nonetheless
portrait described through a reflected
curated. Allan went so far as to paint a
A delight to watch Joy and Allan talk
visual desire. And for Joy and Allan,
canvas after a Mondrian, and chuckled
into and out of a verbal serpentine, then
these vessels create a space that is about
that is was (indeed), “harder than it
a slip-knot, each looping in to interrupt
centering, not containment. The wheaty
looks!" But a beloved piece agreed on by
and finish each other’s thought, correct
palette of the space and many of its
both from the start is a wooden bench,
the story, re-route the conversation. The
hosted objects is restful, with splashes
still in the front vestibule after decades
title of this reflection might have been
of bold color. If an interior reflects a life
from Hobart, Tasmania looking nearly
Collecting Couples, because the unit
together, there is tranquility with an
Shaker in its heavy austerity sitting
is in fact always the inspiration and
enviable amount of spice.
underneath a sizable contemporary egg
limitation of any great collection. The
tempera landscape. The bench holds
Florida-based collectors the Rubells
1969 was a good year for the Nachmans.
the key to the power of the Nachman
spoke at the DIA in 2015, introducing
They met in March and were married
collection, embodying as it does what the
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/Collections
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
Previous spread: Irving Tobocman, architect, Drawing Room, 1965.
Japanese revere in pottery: the qualities
of restraint and that which is subdued.
This egg tempera (a contemporary) work
leads us back to painting. The Nachman
early life together was spent strolling
through galleries in Michigan and New
York City and later all over the globe,
buying painted works, some on monthly
payments (flash back to the Rubells, who
started buying on monthly payments).
This is where color comes in, and has
always been there, especially for Joy, and
has been quietly simmering in basketry,
ceramics, and paintings throughout the
decades of collecting vessels.
Joy sits forward when color enters the
conversation. It is clear that her interest in
baskets and ceramics is the combination
of form and the ability of glaze and fiber to
introduce color, yet she protests (in front
of their five stunning Betty Woodman
oversized, color-ecstatic, sculptural, or
deconstructed vases as Woodman refers
to them) that she doesn’t like anything
flashy or overdone. Contradiction is king!
And her favorite vessels are the Beatrice
Wood opalescent goblets: they are petite,
but bullish in their flash. Joy knows that
her taste distinguishes between the loud
and the exuberant. Betty Woodman, one
of the most exuberant artists of our time,
engages the vessel as canvas; but not
just that, with her vessels it is as though
a swarm of color were flying through
space and slashed against her pots as it
blew by leaving this sectional imprint of
something symphonic. Born in 1930 and at
the potter’s wheel by 1950, her progression
marks her practice as one of the most
ahead of her day, and one of the most
sustaining of the twentieth century. The
exuberant chromaticism of theses pots
brings the symphony of Allan’s youth back
into the embodied form of interior living
in the richest sense of this term interior.
The Woodman vessels in proximity to an
Osolnik wooden bowl, or silent totem of
the Richard Devore, exemplify the range
of vessel language and the Nachman’s
breadth of palette in the field. This brings
me back to the vessel as Greenwich Mean
Time. The intermingling of these jubilee
works and the sobriety of neutral toned
golden sectional works like Devore’s offers
a serpentine experience that is the comme
vous l’aimez (as you like it) of the collector.
PAINTING, STILL LIFE, AND POTS
1990’S
Joy and Allan walked the New York
gallery circuit three to four times each
year, where the Fischbach Gallery was
a top choice. Starting out, like Donald
and Mera Rubell, Allan bartered legal
services for paintings (works by Detroit
painter Carol Wald among others) and
he paid a New York vendor monthly for
the Picasso. Founded by Marilyn Cole
Fischbach in 1960 on Madison Avenue,
the gallery helped launch the careers of
Alex Katz, Eva Hesse, and Knox Martin,
and Fischbach helped strengthen their
eye. In the 1990’s, their interest in the
paintings of Jane Freilicher seemed
to foretell their transition to vessel
collecting and still-life composition.
Their attraction to the work of the late
Australian born Gwyn Hanssen Pigott,
a ceramic artist influenced by English
potters Ray Finch, Michael Cardew,
and Bernard Leach, points to this. The
Nachmans attraction to Freilicher’s
paintings hinted at their attraction to
handcrafted environments and the careful
still-life arrangement characteristic of
the Nabi school. Among one of the most
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Next spread: Irving Tobocman, architect, Dining Room, 1965. Upper left, Betty Woodman, Triptych, 2014.
noteworthy women in painting when the
words “nothing fussy, nothing showy -
gently containing form with sliding glass
scene was male-dominated, Freilicher
authentic forms,” Joy repeats, referring
walls, a partition wall armoire, and a roof
was one of few women artists who were
to egg forms, orbs, and curves in their
lifted open allowing a clerestory band of
exhibiting alongside male counterparts.
atrium space. There is nowhere to
light to flood the space. Present in the
Her painting of urban and country scenes
hide in the open curve of a bowl which
space, one is impacted by a profound
related in tone and texture to the still
reminds me of the Nachman’s skill in the
sensation of being as a form of vessel, as
life and interiors of the Nabi (she drew
practice of attention. Beaded baskets and
well as being in a vessel, inside a vessel,
influences from Bonnard, Vuillard, and
discovering Dona Look baskets made of
among vessels. When W.B. Yeats’ poem
Matisse), as well as Giorgio Morandi,
silk and paper birch bark at Perimeter
“Among School Children” famously
establishing her position as a tangential
Gallery in Chicago started to expand
declared, “How can we tell the dancer from
member of the New York School of the
1950’s. Frielicher’s work was important to
New York painters (Helen Frankenthaler,
Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Fairfield
the vessel language from solid to porous.
They decided to collect vessel forms
instead of collecting a broad spectrum,
which brought a great deal of purpose
the dance,” the question, the image of
inseparability, is in part one of being as a
kinesthesia of fit: this skin for this surface
and no other; this movement for this form
/Collections
Porter, Larry Rivers) and poets (John
and also the purpose and the thrill that
and no other; here – being here – like this.
Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara,
comes only from landing something
The experience of the Nachman home is
and James Schuyler). A gestural siren
you already long sought after. Many a
that, indeed, of the experience of a vessel,
made by Arizona artist Heloise Christa
collector’s methodology is to aim in a
and not merely a collection of vessels, with
floats in bronze as you approach the
general direction, then delight when they
textures of movement and surfaces that
Nachmans’ front door, and though they
encounter something unexpected. Not the
respond to different times of day and to
enjoy the recognizable, they prefer the
case for Joy and Allan. Sculptural vessels
different ways of moving around, within,
implied conversation among clustered
- wood, ceramic, or woven - and likely by
and across its forms. I am reminded
forms to the traditional narrative of
certain artists are already known. The
of the great English aesthete Adrian
representational works.
search for them has long become targeted.
Stokes – whom I first encountered in the
teaching of my mentor (the Englishman)
THE VESSEL ENTERS THE
GLENN ADAMSON AND THE VESSEL
Tony Hepburn then my husband Michael
COLLECTION
AS ARCHEOLOGICAL FIRST
Stone-Richards for whom Stokes was a
What Joy and Allan found in vessels
Sitting in the Nachmans’ drawing room, it
cult figure in the Cambridge of his friend
was inherently modernist and in their
is palpable how the space is itself a vessel,
the potter Edmund de Waal. Stokes
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The Nachman home – architecture, décor, domesticity – as
vessel is not merely a collection of vessels but an embodiment,
it seems to me, of the carving, receptive approach to art and its
experience as a way of living-with.
famously distinguished between two
fundamental approaches to art-making
and aesthetic experience: what he called
modelling and carving. The modelling
approach was marked by the straight
line, angularity, and a certain speed. It
is the idiom of the language of psychic
violence (think Picasso or aspects of de
Kooning and the prevalence of gouging,
cutting, attacking actions on the surface
in their work), the very opposite of the
carving approach marked by the curve,
restfulness, and receptivity (think
Piero, or Henry Moore and the ease
with which thought and eye respond to
the invitation from the work). Though
Stokes was insistent that all important art
and aesthetic experience was a dynamic
interaction of these two approaches it
was clear that he held a preference for
the carving approach believing as he
did, following the thought of the great
psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, that though
aesthetic experience was a necessary
vehicle of psychic violence ultimately art
was a seeking of restorative balance. (For
Klein, and likewise Stokes, the violence
was a means by which the archaic, that
is, the oldest layers of the unconscious
mind, come to the surface.) For this
reason, Stokes regarded it as essential
that works of art be grasped not only as
discrete objects but within the larger
framework of the home and the artistic
form for thinking about the home and
domesticity that is, architecture, for an
art collection articulates an architecture
while an architecture houses and nestles
the content which it comes to embody.
The Nachman home – architecture, décor,
domesticity – as vessel is not merely a
collection of vessels but an embodiment,
it seems to me, of the carving, receptive
approach to art and its experience as a
way of living-with. No, it would be too easy,
facile, and even cheap, to say that this
is all a function of privilege. Following
Klein, Stokes sees the roots of art in
the holding position, that is, the way in
which the child experiences the maternal
form of being held. Whether being held
or being refused holding is not a matter
of material privilege, but a whole future
world will be built on this experience, and
one sees, experiences everywhere in the
Nachman house the forms and surfaces
of the carving mode of reception and few
if any violent breaks or transitions. The
vessel is not only what is collected in this
household, the vessel is the image of a
deep unconscious desire for holding and
the refusal or keeping at bay of psychic
violence.
If this collection needed to be put into
the context of other collections, it might
be helpful to mention that the Nachmans
bookended my visit that morning with
a chat with Glenn Adamson, former
Director of Research at the Victoria
and Albert Museum, and recently
departed Nanette L. Laitman, Director
of the Museum of Arts and Design. Just
finishing their conversation, Adamson,
renown curator and writer/thinker on
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Top: Beatrice Wood, Luster-glazed Earthenware, L to R c.1978, c.1978, c.1992, c.1986, c.1958.
Middle: Upper left; Richard Devore, Stoneware, 2005. Center; Richard Raffin, Cocobolo Wood Vessel pair. Upper right; Grant Vaughn, White Beech Vessel, 2001. Lower
left; Robert Howard, Cedar Vessel, 2001. Lower right; Debra Muhl, Wrapped Fiber Vessels, 1999, 2002.
Bottom: Various wood turned vessels, Center column of shelving features wood turnings by Collector, Allan Nachman.
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
Facing: Gwynn Hannsen Pigott, Still Life #7, 1995, Porcelain.
craft and design, and someone whom I
NYC. Adamson observes that Gell had
intentionalities that are complex,
read in graduate school (and I envision
been deeply impressed by the exhibition
demanding of attention and perhaps
as the Mother Teresa of Craft, saving and
Art / Artifact, curated by Susan Vogel for
difficult to reconstruct fully.” 12 This idea
uplifting, and simultaneously acting as
the Museum of African Art in New York,
of the difficult but entrancing object has
craft scholar/bouncer who has helped to
and particularly her decision to display
increasingly become a dominant model
throw off the craft underlingism of the
a hunting net (made by the Zande people
for a new museography and curatorial
past half century. He has finally made
of central Africa) tightly baled and set in
stance in all kinds of exhibition venues.
a bore of the Art vs Craft binary). Glenn
the middle of a white cube gallery, looking
is sitting at the tiled breakfast table
for all the world as if it were a piece of
Still, what I, who grew up with a
discussing business, about to leave for
contemporary art. 11
woodturning father and among potters,
his talk at Cranbrook Academy of Art; he
what I am groping after is the non-verbal,
paces the collection, evaluating the vessel
placement he curated for the Nachmans
the last time he was in town. We should
all have collections that entice a Glenn
Adamson goes on to explore how
Gell illuminates the first attempts at
making art and anthropological objects
interchangeable when he published the
pre-theoretical aspect of the vessel or
container or first carrier, the extension
of the hand, or body that is, and I mean
the object that is not composite with
/Collections
Adamson to come play in our living room.
article on “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks
words (“Seeing comes before words,” as
His thoughts on anthropology have been
and Artworks as Traps” which argued for
John Berger opens his Ways of Seeing),
most compelling to me in helping me
an ecumenical approach in which objects
even, at a certain level, before seeing or
come to terms with the mind-bending
are shown not according to preexisting
independent of seeing, the world of touch
originality of vessels. Here, originality is
category (fine art, craft, ethnographic
of which the great phenomenologists
used in terms of the first one, the oldest,
material), but rather for their potential
such as Merleau-Ponty went to such
the one that started it all. Original sin.
to ensnare the audience in a web of
extent to render – yes, through words
Original joy. The without this first thing
interpretive implication (“Artworks as
– as something pre-predicative, that is,
nothing else is possible, original. And by
Traps”). All objects that are “vehicles of
before acts of intellectual judgment,
this I mean the vessel as form. In “The
complicated ideas,” he wrote, including
not unlike the holding and being held of
Task of Re-Enchantment,” a chapter in
things like hunting nets that are ostensibly
mother and child so important to Klein
his The Invention of Craft, Adamson,
“pragmatic and technical” in nature, could
and Stokes as a root-source of aesthetic
alluding to the great anthropological
be equally regarded as suitable objects for
experience. Imagine for a moment being
thinker Alfred Gell, references the
aesthetic and conceptual interpretation:
in the middle of a trip, luggage on the
strategic conflation of Art / Artifact in
“ I would define as a candidate artwork any
sidewalk, and the suitcase disappears,
the pivotal exhibition curated by Susan
object or performance that potentially
and all contents of said luggage are on a
Vogel for the Museum of African Art in
rewards such scrutiny because it embodies
pile on the pavement. What at first you
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
saw as a hassle, or at least a trek, might
then become un-navigable. Money and
purpose made the trip possible, but, in
certain ways your suitcase vessel (in this
moment) is a condition of possibility of
the fact of mobility – the fact of the trip,
if you will. Or, let’s imagine the vessel
line-up in going for milk on a Saturday
morning. One might go from vessel (bed)
to vessel (car) to vessel (store) with vessels
(grocery cart, and later bag) paying from
vessels (wallet inside purse or pocket) and
your body within a living vessel (skin)
that contains millions of vessels (heart,
kidneys, blood cells) and this sack of
vegetables brought to you by a massive
system of vessels (water pipelines, harvest
buckets, shipping containers). Before
currency and politics made mobility
into state-sanctioned commerce-bound
systems, there was the simple desire to
walk away from one’s water source, or
carry berries to one’s family. The water/
seed bag, basket, and pot made first
mobility possible. Containing sustenance
liberated people to explore, and mobility
or the lack thereof became a foundational
feature of every culture since we stood on
our hind feet. The vessel is the profoundest
symbolization of this archaic trace in
human mobility. Containment, that is,
holding, is the possibility of growth as
also maturation.
I’m beginning to feel that I am getting
closer to what moves the Nachmans to
collect. (For all authentic collections
there is the mystery, Why collect? What
is the impulse, the drive, the necessity
to collect?) This mystery is made visible
when you see a crowd watch a potter’s
wheel like a camp fire, silent, mesmerized
and deeply entertained. The smallest of
children must touch it. Adamson writes
about the German idea of craft as linked
to enchantment when he says that “our
[English] word craft derives from the
German word kraft, meaning power or
potency, and its archaic bond with sorcery
is preserved in terms as “witchcraft.”
We also say “crafty.” Meaning deceptive
or wily (a term often applied to Native
Americans in the nineteenth century).
[Anthropologist Alfred] Gell in
another important essay entitled “The
Enchantment of Technology and the
Technology of Enchantment,” provided
a persuasive theoretical account of this
complex relationship between skill,
potency, transfixion, and deception.” 13
Adamson then quotes Gell himself:
The enchantment of technology is the
power that technical processes have of
casting a spell over us so that we see the
real world in an enchanted form. Art,
as a separate kind of technical activity,
only carries further, through a kind of
involution, the enchantment which
is immanent in all kinds of technical
activity… It is the way an art object is
construed as having come into the world
which is the source of power such objects
have over us - their becoming rather than
their being. 14
This undeniable being of an object is
enchanting, yes, but the child reaches
out to the potter’s wheel to see if their
hand can do that too. Adamson says of
this instinctual activity, “a crafted object
is enchanted because we understand it in
relative terms – relative, that is, to what we
could achieve with our own hands. Crafts
stages an asymmetry between maker
and viewer, articulated by a difference
in particle knowledge. This explains why
handmade objects, in general, are more
likely to produce an effect of enchantment
than mass-produced ones.” 15
The idea of the relativity of one’s own
skill in the realm of making and crafted
objects is complicated further still by the
idea of valuation, and the connoisseur. In
order to become a connoisseur, one must
learn, on one’s own, or at the example of
others. Joy and Allan have spent years
maintaining ongoing conversations and
relationships with artists, gallerists,
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
and connoisseurial groups. It may not
have been their intention to build such
their reach in collecting, the international
art fair circuit continues to expand access
whose fundamental thesis is that making
creates knowledge, builds environments
a learning network, but this is exactly
to national and international craft artists.
and transforms lives, argues that “the
what they’ve done as though the works
They have been so impacted by the Art
only way one can really know things - that
themselves in collection called out for
Basel Miami, for example, that they
is, from the very inside of one’s being -
such articulation of sense and it has
purchased property in Miami and never
is through the process of self-discovery.
shaped their lives.
miss a fair.
To know things you have to grow into
them, and let them grow in you, so that
COLLECTION GUIDES/ /FIRST
SIGNIFICANT CERAMICS
ACCQUISITION
In 1987 Joy and Allan moved to their
Bloomfield Hills home with daughter,
Elanah, then 12, and son David, 9. They
consulted with design duo, David and
Bobby Goldburg and began exploring
Austrian contemporary design from
Biedermeier, Vienna from the 1930’s.
David Goldburg took them to their first
Sculptural Objects and Functional Art
(SOFA) Chicago exhibition and whilst
there ceramics captured their curiosity.
They purchased a work of glass and a
triptych by Betty Woodman. Never
again collecting glass, they quickly
developed what would become an ongoing
desire for the work of Betty Woodman,
their first significant purchase. The
Woodman triptych was a breakthrough
acquisition with luscious color (for Joy),
and edgy vessel form (for Allan). Her work
exemplified the all-in-one language for the
couple. Where SOFA Chicago accelerated
David Goldburg as guide in Chicago is
just one example of how many influential
trips and conversations the Nachman’s
have had with collecting guides, be
they artists, gallerists, or scholars, and
it speaks to the communal aspect of
shared exploration and ongoing learning
over time which creates a force-field
into which collections are born and
the emergence of sense assumes forms
of its own as the collection becomes in
an important way organic and so itself
capable of spontaneity. The formation of
affective and initiatory relationships - the
friendships of artists, guides, gallerists,
and fellow collectors - inevitably comes
to mirror, impact, and articulate the
already existing relationships latent
within the network of vessel forms and
the collection. This communion of guides
allows for self-discovery to unfold over
time, giving space for understanding
and all the benefits that accompany the
state of embodied appreciation. In his
book, Making, anthropologist Tim Ingold,
they become a part of who you are. […]
The mere provision of information holds
no guarantee of knowledge, let alone of
understanding.” 16 Anyone who is close to
an art collector knows that the collection/
collecting, becomes a way of life, not
merely a hobby or activity, and further
that the process, people and objects
sculpt the very life of the collector, for the
medium shared between artwork existing
in a network or collection and the collector
is life itself. It is a creative and identifying
practice. Joy and Allan clearly note that
several galleries have been key in their
construction of quality, aesthetic, and
an understanding of the market. To be
a collector, then, is to be teachable, and
willing to be part of a larger conversation
the outcome of which is the continuation
of a process without end…
The California gallery, Del Mano,
introduced them to many wood artists
who would become the most significant
in their collection- William Hunter, Ron
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
P.226: Top: Upper Left; Jun Kaneko, Stoneware platters, 1988.
Bottom: Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2010. Viola Frey, Polyptych lll, 1990. Foreground; Toshiko Takaezu, Clay, c.1997.
Upper right self; Anders Ruhwald, Clay, 2014.
Layport, Mike Shuler, Michael Mode
and Peter Petrochko, to name a few.
They understood well by this time the
significance of nurturing relationships
with artists, gallerists, and other
collectors. Commissioning work from
artists also became a new way of relating
to artists and fleshing out the collection
with works they imagined, but could not
find. They collected Toshiko Takaezu at
Pewabic Pottery, a historic Detroit midcentury
pottery famous for its tile work
which has been an important venue. From
a similar pottery in Flemmington, New
Jersey, Joy and Allan also collected fifteen
pieces in the 1990’s of Fulper Pottery
from the early 1900’s. Nancy Hoffman
of the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, a friend
and guide, introduced them to the work
of Viola Frey, from whom they purchased
a large oil pastel in 1990. Over the years
Joy and Allan have continued to collect
Betty Woodman, and Beatrice Wood (a
one hundred and five old godmother of
pottery and Dada) whose works Joy claims
as her favorite in the collection. With its
shimmering opalescent surface and folkdancer
formal qualities Joy describes it
as feminine in form and color. Joy also
links an early collected beaded basket
from Racine Art Museum, by Jaenette
Ahlgren as another of her favorites, a form
at once open, geometric, and colorful.
Sometimes more intriguing than what is
kept in a collection is what is jettisoned.
Shifting from painting toward threedimensional
works, the Nachmans
commissioned a wall hanging from a
weaver in Caracas, Venezuela, known
for their wool productions. Allan’s sister
had lived there at the time. An early piece
that remains central to the living space
from the mid-1970’s is a marble piece by
Carol Brenner. In the late 1970’s and early
1980’s Joy and Allan discovered The West,
therefore, fine craft. They described the
Joanne Rapp Gallery /The Hand and the
Sprit Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, and
how an entire era of collecting was built
around this gallery - they may have found
their collecting language, or process, or
maybe their medium at Hand and Spirit.
The West seemed to have provided the first
intimations they were in possession of a
collector’s language. The West brought
them Ed Moulthrop as a point of entry
- a Princeton trained architect-cum
woodturner, one of a three-generation
woodturning family. Moulthrop is
credited with being the father of modern
woodturning and stocked his visual
archive with trips to Paris, London, and
Switzerland as well as a brief time as a
student of watercolor in Fontainebleau,
a forested weekend getaway for Parisians.
His influences and sensibility reflected
the Nachman’s and mirrored Allan’s early
form attraction. Joy’s friends teased them
over the years, “Why all the wood, too
round! Too brown!” She cherished the
forms, but sought works that would bring
color to the collection through baskets and
ceramic vessels.
Travel between galleries, with mentors,
and friends, has shaped the collection’s
demographic. Trips to the Riva Yares
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
P.227: Top: Upper left; Dona Look, Birch basket, 1992. Upper center; Betty Woodman, Earthenware Pillow Pitcher, 1987. Upper right
pair, Robert Howard, Cedar Vessels; Middle shelf grouping of five, William Hunter, Cocobolo Wood Vessels, c.1997-c.2001. Lower left,
Ken Carlson, Copper Basket, 1991. Lower middle, Ann Van Hoey, Earthenware Vessels, 2012. Lower Right, Linda Benglis, Clay, 2014.
Bottom: Right, Jeanette Ahlgren, Cheatham Grove, 2007. Woven glass bead basket.
Gallery, for example, shuttered in 2005,
Detroit-based potter, and former studio
see if he could head South to learn basic
provided ground to collect Norman
assistant to Edmund de Waal.
woodturning and Osolnik in turn hosted
Bluhm, now owned by the Nachman’s son,
a three-day tutorial.. For those of you out
David. The evolution of Gwyn Hanssen
HANDS- ON
of the wood loop, this is like calling up
Pigott ceramic work lead to a trip to
On the influence of the gallerist / artist
Michelangelo to see if he’d teach you to
Australia and the encounter with Karen
relationship in the training of the
mix paint. And he says, “sure, come on
O’Clery, who exposed the Nachmans to
sleek forms, also in the vein of straightsided
white and neutral toned pots, her
inclination leaning toward design and
sensibility of a collector we may invoke,
once more, Tim Ingold who makes
the argument that anthropology is to
ethnography what learning-with is to
down.” This intimate encounter tipped off
a rich exchange of meetings and intimate
mini-conventions between wood artists,
gallerists, and collectors at homes and
/Collections
industrial fabrication.
learning-from: In anthropology, then,
studios.
we go to study with people. And we hope
The Nachmans attribute much of their
to learn from them. What we might call
NACHMANS’ IMPACT ON WOOD ART
direction in collecting to several key
‘research’ or even ‘fieldwork’ is in truth
In the contemporary art world right
institutions, one being the Detroit
a protracted masterclass in which the
now, it seems every video artist and
Institute of Art, specifically the Friends of
novice gradually learns to see things, and
social practitioner is a ceramic artist
Modern and Contemporary Art for which
to hear and feel them too, in the ways his
as well as clay no longer represents the
Allan served as chair from 2013-2014.
or her mentors do. It is in short, to what
underclass of the artworld and everyone
They credit this exposure to acquiring a
the ecological psychologist James Gibson
is trying their hand at chunky pots or
taste for more textural ceramic surfaces
calls an education of attention. 17
community installations (and here one
such as the work of Ken Price, and
need only think of the meal / dinner in
Linda Benglis, and to moving back into
At a local art fair Allan and Joy met Indiana
contemporary art practice). But if potters
monochrome, but with a Netherlandish
farmer / woodturner Charlie Hutson, who
felt unseen by “fine artists” for the last
flare as seen in their installation work by
urged Allan to call Rude Osolnik, a well-
hundred years, they haven’t spoken with
Marie T. Hermann, a rising Danish star,
known woodturner in Berea, Kentucky, to
a wood artist lately. The community of
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wood artists was unorganized, unrecognized,
and under-collected still late into the late 1980’s.
The Nachmans have contributed significantly to
contemporary craft through their collaborative
role in convening the first association of
collectors of wood art. Allan and Joy Nachman
are founding members of the Collectors of Wood
Art (CWA) who self- organized in the late 1990’s.
In fall of 1997, Robyn and John Horn invited
one hundred top wood collectors, artists, and
gallerists to her home in Little Rock, Arkansas
for a weekend of intense dining, conversation,
and an instant gallery (which turned into a
collector’s feeding frenzy), the goal being to
elevate the culture surrounding wood art. The
Nachmans and Ron and Anita Wornick, and
twenty others formed the founding steering
committee that determined the group’s
priorities. This founding board held a common
belief that the role of gallerist was the critical
bridge between the artist and collector that
created and stabilized the art market, and for
this reason they vowed to support the esteem
of wood art and the field continues to thrive.
THE CONTEMPORARY MOMENT
In comparison to Marie T. Hermann’s paired
back forms in a palette of a thousand whites,
the carved work of Robert Howard represents
the most embellished work, fluted with curves,
almost too much for Joy who maintains her
preference for simple form. But, she says this
with a full size beaded Nick Cave Soundsuit
Joy and Allan Nachman, 2016.
staring over my shoulder in hyperactive
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
polychrome. What is the bridge from
the leached seal skin Richard DeVore
vessel on the shelf to the Nick Cave? Joy
persists that even the Cave is classical,
and refined. I do buy that it is refined, but
related, I’m not sure. I think something
more interesting is going on here, the next
thread of their sensibility as collectors.
Like all good artists, the Nachmans
are standing at the edge of their next
collecting chapter, this article is a time
stamp that ten years will make more
interesting reading. The Nachmans
have been looking and joining forces with
objects now for nearly 40 years. It is now
that we can see before us what Tim Ingold
speaks of as the learner/collector who has
moved into correspondence with their
works. 18 It is a dialogical union as opposed
to a knowledge gained by way of the simple
amassing of objects, and is beautiful to
witness. It is also, I believe, the vibration
one feels when witnessing a collector’s
clarity of voice. In the Nachmans’ next
collecting chapter, I would anticipate
more color, and forms that fall out of the
round or brown category, but it will be
related to the vessel if in concept only, but
we can rely on these works to complicate
and extend the language of craft as sense
and sensibility. ■
/Collections
1 Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 7.
2 Leach, A Potter’s Book, 4.
3 Nearly always, when Leach touches on the Fine Arts / Crafts
distinction he places the words applied and fine in quotation marks
4 Cf. Edmund de Waal, Bernard Leach (London: Tate, 1997).
5 Leach, A Potter’s Book, 1.
6 Leach, A Potter’s Book, 9.
7 Leach, A Potter’s Book, 13.
8 Leach, A Potter’s Book, 7.
9 Leach, A Potter’s Book, 8.
10 Leach, A Potter’s Book, 8.
11 Glenn Adamson, “The Task of Re-Enchantment,” The Invention of
Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 98.
12 Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as
Traps,” quoted in Adamson, The Invention of Craft, 98.
13 Adamson, “The Task of Re-Enchantment,” 99.
14 Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as
Traps,” quoted in Adamson, The Invention of Craft, 99.
15 Adamson, “The Task of Re-Enchantment,” 100.
16 Tim Ingold, “Knowing from the Inside,” Making (London: Routledge,
2013), 1.
17 Ingold, “Knowing from the Inside,” 2.
18 Cf. Ingold, “Knowing from the Inside,” 7.
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Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
7
/Marie T.
Hermann
/ Research
232/233
DetroitResearch /On Dance
The Discreet Music of
Marie T. Hermann's Objects
/ MICHAEL STONE-RICHARDS
[Plays, Acting, and Music will be followed by Studies in Seven Arts] in which music will be
dealt with in greater detail, side by side with painting, sculpture, architecture, handicraft,
dancing, and the various arts of the stage.
Arthur Symons, “Preface,” Plays, Acting, and Music 1
As with the experimental dance and choreography of
1. Biba Bell, so, too, is the work of Marie T. Hermann part
of an international language of ceramics but one extended,
following the work of her mentor the potter and writer
Edmund de Waal, into installation and the language of post-
Minimal forms and poetics of placement. Rachel Whiteread,
Carl André, Donald Judd are as important for Hermann as
any potter, though Lucie Rie and Hans Coper would certainly
be regarded as part of the same universe of taste as the great
Minimalist and post-Minimalist artists. The thoughtful work
of, say, Warren McKenzie and his followers – the Minnesota
School as it is sometimes called – with its emphasis upon the
handmade and sense of measure determined by use, and so a
work for which the gallery is at best the place for the viewer
to find and select the work of choice - for it is how one uses
and lives with the vessels that matters - is not the controlling
aesthetic of Marie Hermann. Even, maybe especially in, the
work of Edmund de Waal – who long ago transitioned from the
restricted community of potters into the fine-art gallery system
as an installation artist – there is a preciosity of the hand not
to be found in the work of Hermann. 2 For this work, there is a
visual agnosia or imperceptibility between the handmade and
the industrial made, since this is not an aesthetic that sees
the organicism of the unique hand (creation) as in any way
superior to the anonymity of the mass-made (production), and
so every effort is typically made to remove the trace of the hand.
It is, aesthetically and ethically, not merely a form of refusal
but more pointedly a form and poetics of withdrawal, as may
become clear through a consideration of the kind of experience
at work in the objects, their installation and placement (or
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/Marie T. Hermann
Marie T. Hermann’s studio, Pontiac 2015. Photos courtesy of the artist
All photos of the works of Marie T. Hermann are by Tim Thayer unless otherwise stated,
courtesy of the Simone DeSousa Gallery and the artist.
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
arrangement, as Hermann and Adamson put it in their
conversation). As Hermann makes clear in her conversation
with Glenn Adamson (in this issue) when he reminds her of
the “strong philosophical weight that is attached to the mark
of the hand in ceramics,” she says simply: “I’ve just never been
interested in that.”
Environments. What, then, is the interest of these
2. works which seem to come either carefully arranged on
shelves (not unlike three-dimensional still lives of a particular
kind not, it must be said, completely unrelated to the post-
Surrealist object or construction), or massed liked multiple
unities of the same like soldiers of the Chinese Terra Cotta
Army of the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BCE), and captured – or
overlaid - in richly associative, temptingly projective titles
such as To the legion of the lost (2007), Stillness in the Glorious
Wilderness (2010), A Gentle Blow to the Rock (2013), and most
recently, at the Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit, And dusk
turned dawn, Blackthorn (2015)? First, it must be said that the
gallery is the conceptual and physical frame of these objects
- platonic solids, blobs, stretched formless surfaces of latex,
mixed media, and assorted non-functional vessels. Shelf –
Frame. The presence of the shelf throughout the work, a thing
for showing another thing, is the frame that permits objects
to have articulation from the ground of the environment,
and as such to be objects of attention and phantasmatic
permutations. The shelf, and the scale of the objects in
their placement, objects not readily identifiable as useful or
functional, and frequently not even identifiable at all – whence
my suggestion of them as post-Surrealist constructions –
these objects on the formal shelf phenomenologically function
in ways comparable to the child’s perspective. Shelving, after
all, is where things are put out of the reach (of the child), and
the child is the person – or, to capture the adult’s sense of the
availability of childhood – the child is the condition of being
a person in which newness – strangeness – is always marked
by the sense of discovery and poignancy, touching something
for the first time as though it should not be touched (and so
not grasping, nor even being greedy with the eye). Be they
Platonic solids, or vessels, there is a sense of all the objects
and things on shelves in this body of work of being stripped
down – here white is not simply white but the mark of the very
process of abstraction, a process linked to both thinking and
memory – as though the objects are the remains, the forms
of a memory of what was once encountered for the first time,
as new, as mysterious. May be there was, once, in empirical
time and space, a vessel that looked like a bowl from a science
lab for mixing chemicals (of the kind seen in Untitled 11 and
Untitled 12 and You are my weather), but it is not its function
that matters now so much as the memory of first encountering
it stripped of its local markers and become part of the theatre
of memory (the question of place): we see this in the still-life
placements of Morandi – whom one cannot imagine not being
part of the dialogue of this work – and we also see it in the great
enigmatic but also fundamentally still-life placements of de
Chirico’s proto-Surrealist works such as the great Le Mauvais
génie d’un roi [The evil genius of a king], 1914, oil on canvas,
in The Modern in New York, 3 and there is a stunning suite of
photographs by Man Ray called Mathematical Objects and first
published in Cahiers d’Art in 1934 and they are what they say
they are in their titles: photographs of mathematical objects,
but taken in such a way that they become stripped down
modern sculptures of great beauty, simplicity, and mystery
– in black and white. 4 Frame – Environment. The sheet of
bricks laid out on the floor on which To the legion of the lost is
presented is every bit as much a frame as the shelves on walls
which emphasize figure-ground articulations – the movement
of verticality and horizontality needs to be interpreted
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/Marie T. Hermann
Marie T. Hermann, To the legion of the lost, 2007. Photo by Michael Harvey
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
- though in this case it is all but certain that the sheet of
bricks engages with Carle André’s grid-based floor sculpture.
Installation. Every installation, that is, every considered act of
placement in predetermined space, is implicitly the evocation
or creation of a possible whole environment – this is especially
so where the gallery is seen as a laboratory (in architecture,
in Constructivist as well as Surrealist exhibitions) or a standin
for a theatre where objects are grasped by those present as
in some sense possessing autonomy, that is, agency. In this
respect, the gallery space is a function of the question of place
(lieu), that is, the moment where (not simply the moment
when) multiple temporalities are imbricated. Wallpaper
and the question of place, or lieu de mémoire. The use of
wallpaper with apparently autobiographical associations in
the exhibition And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn serves to
confirm the gallery as a function of place this time activated
through the place of memory. Conversing with Hermann in
the gallery of And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn, Adamson
comments: “This brings us directly to William Morris.
William Morris designed this wallpaper to give us exactly
the effect we are experiencing. Which is, you take a room
and you turn it into this intimate warm glade, that suggests
[…] something you can’t quite touch, a dream space.” The
dream space – or psychical place, the other place as Freud
characterized it - is the very model of complex temporalities
available in social space when a place and function become
invested by its participants. We learn from Hermann that
the wallpaper in question was a part of her childhood in the
small farmhouse outside Copenhagen which her family of
architects (mother and father) owned. Such decoration was
unusual given her parents’ modernist Scandinavian tastes
dominated by white. Within the spatiality of the gallery the
wallpaper evokes a place and serves to seal a place of memory,
to project a sense of continuity and seamlessness through the
establishment of an environment – and yet for all that, the
experience is not personal but structural (what Adamson is
getting at when he comments that “there is something kind of
impersonal about the objects [of this exhibition].” What kind
of experience, then, is in question and for which the wallpaper
serves as proxy, an opening?
“The poet and paper-maker,” was how Henry James
referred to William Morris in a letter of 1881. “Wallpaper
is a peculiar thing,” begins Shelley Selim’s essay in this
volume on Hermann. The Blackthorn wallpaper designed
by Morris 5 – the design is still available in fabric and
wallpaper – may well have autobiographical associations
for Marie Hermann, but in the context of the gallery it
functions as the attempt to project a seamlessness of
environment in which a certain kind of dramaturgy
can be played out with the bodies of audience present,
immersed in it – the drama of what the great Belgian
Symboliste Maurice Maeterlinck called the treasure of
the humble, and Morris the lesser arts of life.
From Henry James to Adolph Loos who wrote: “anyone
who goes to [Beethoven’s] Ninth and then sits down
to design a wallpaper pattern is either a fraud or a
degenerate.” 6 (One is tempted to ask if it would be okay,
then, to design the wallpaper before one goes to listen to
Beethoven’s Ninth.) Yes, wallpaper is a peculiar thing.
And yes, there is poetry in wallpaper, which is to say,
there is poetry derivable from ordinariness: “In 1938, the
20th century’s greatest painter [Picasso] made a work of
art of wallpaper [Femmes à leur toilette, 1938 7 ],” 8 and
there is poetry already latent in ordinariness, whence
Maeterlinck’s great essay on the poetry of stillness and
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
/Marie T. Hermann
Marie T. Hermann, To the legion of the lost, 2007. Photo by Michael Harvey
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
ordinariness, “Le tragique quotidien,” and its quest for
an ethic of sentiment where “It is no longer a question
of [the pursuit of] an exceptional and intense [violent]
moment of existence, but of existence itself,” 9 that is,
existence without the masking of great passion which is
but the projection of the ego. This is what is at issue, what
is in question with the ethic and aesthetic of withdrawal
as found in an aesthetic of the ordinary and for which
what Morris called in nineteenth-century fashion the
lesser arts - which, since the avant-garde assault on the
very epistemological foundations of the fine arts and its
history, namely, the history of art, are no longer thought
of as lesser in significance - have become the vehicles
in contemporary practice. The ordinary is not banal.
The objects of And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn or To
the legion of the lost are not banal objects – we shall not
chance upon them in the street or in the home - for they
are not familiar to viewers unfamiliar with the body of
this work of art (or even comparable practices), yet any
sense that such objects might convey of unusualness is
quickly dissolved by the mode of repetition of the same:
the same or near indiscernible shade of white repeated
in an indefinite number of all but the same vessel-form
and in a finish of mid-gloss as to be industrial, that is,
devoid of distinction. Rhythm comes from the placement
and arrangements of the forms, indeed, there is more
rhythm in the arrangement of the rims of the vessels than
the bodies themselves – another way in which this work
differs from that of de Waal where rhythm is the very
body of the work inviting the body, the hand of the viewer
to feel. Still, the lineaments of repetition make for the
ordinary and after a certain point neither more nor fewer
of the same will make for the interesting: our habits, our
routines, our rituals, they are what they are, the social
forms of repetition, and these forms, vessels, objects
in their repetition present the conditions of becomingordinary
and the conditions of the transformation within
the ordinary that is the experience latent in these objects,
that is, indeed, liminal to their configuration.
Modes of liminality. Perhaps now we can approach
3. again the question, What kind of experience, then, is
in question and for which the wallpaper serves as proxy, an
opening? (This question points also to the subject of the work.)
By liminality in its simplest sense we understand threshold, in
particular, experiences marked by thresholds: the approach,
the crossing of thresholds, and as such experiences where the
difference between this and that, here and there could be as
infinitely small (inframince) or as large and for which there
need be no clear mark of transition, for only afterwards (aprèscoup)
might one be aware that something has happened,
whether accidentally or no. The approach of sleep, dreaming,
being conscious yet not self-aware, hypnogogia are all threshold
states (in this instance what psychiatrists have long called
états secondaires / secondary states); but so too is the crossing
into puberty a liminal transition, as are heroic adventures,
etc. Certain places – deserts, forests, the Zone in Tarkovsky’s
Stalker (1979) – are understood to be in states of liminal
suspension. More simply, the approach of night (dusk) or the
emergence of morning from the night (dawn) are modes of
temporal liminality and are conditions where the conventional
logic of identity breaks down – this is why this temporality was
so beloved by Romantics, Symbolistes, and Surrealists and in
their painting and poetry is often marked by mauve / violet
/ purple (just think of the role of violet in T.S. Eliot’s Waste
Land (the violet light, the violet air) especially when spoken by
Volume Two / Spring / Fall 2016
the liminal being par excellence Tiresias, “At the violet hour
[…] / […] when the human engine waits, like a taxi throbbing,
waiting,/ I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two
lives”). Liminality is pre-eminently the experience of a state
of suspension variously theorized as the interval, the between
(entre), or in-betweenness. The exhibition And dusk turned
dawn, Blackthorn evokes and invites a temporal mode of
liminality and in this volume of Detroit Research Anthony
Marcellini has much to say about this mode of experience in
Hermann’s work. There is another mode of liminality that is as
important and helps one to comprehend the role of intimacy as
distance – one of the subjects of this work – as well as the role
of the ordinary where such intimacy can be found. Hermann
in her interview – and also in the teaching studio – speaks
of the “very interesting moments in our ordinary lives,” and
it should be clear that her forms and her language for taking
about her forms – puddles, sticks, blobs, tactility – point to
the small scale and the intimate marked by a phenomenology
of approach in terms of proximity, point, and tension, that is
to say, it is the approach and not the thing reached, the kind
of space (the problem of place) and not the thing in space
which is but there to give shape to space, to allow space to be
embodied as provisional place, an entre (between). She speaks
of “That contrast [my emphasis] between the very still and the
unchangeable to this hovering movement, that is neither here
nor there [my emphases]. It is just there for a little while”; and
to Adamson’s question, “What about the crystalline forms that
look almost like natural geological specimens?” she responds
that “They are kind of a development of those block forms.
Which is a way of looking at tactility and the moment when
we touch something, the moment where our hands meet an
object. […] So these things were a way of thinking of that space
[place] where you touch something.” (My emphases.) The role
of titles is part of this phenomenology of approach to space
and proximity insofar as the title in these works always opens
up and itself takes place (the title is an event) in-between
work and resonance in a kind of respect for and ceremony of
intimacy with the work: as if to say, the title is there, but leaves
the work alone. Do you think, for example, that the title The
Evil Genius of a King explains the painting by de Chirico with
that title, or even indicates the subject of the painting? No,
yet the title belongs to the painting; likewise To the legion of
the lost or And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn belong to their
works at a distance, hence resonance, the music of the work
removed from the physical into an interior and visual music.
Not for Hermann the large-scale statements and marshalling
of affect of her mentor de Waal as evidenced in his recent
Gagosian show Atemwende (2013) where the ceramic work
is a meditation on Paul Celan and how to approach the body
“after Auschwitz,” or in his recent book The White Road (2015)
where white in de Waal is death, the death of people on the Silk
Road or through exploitation of labor, but also the transfigured
death expressed in Eliot’s, The Waste Land
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you? 10
There is a playfulness to Hermann’s titles no longer to be
found in de Waal, though both share a pursuit of the question
as to what kind of affective weight can be carried by ceramic
pots and vessels: in Atemwende, de Waal ups the challenge, in
/Marie T. Hermann
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DetroitResearch /On Dance
effect, by compelling the viewer not to forget that ceramics is
the art of fire – whence the appearance of black tones in the
more recent work, especially that work Atemwende, devoted to
reflection on the fate of Paul Celan where the representability
or not of the burnt Thing is positioned as the subject of the
work. 11
Hermann’s industrial / serial production prefers
distance as condition for intimacy and playfulness, and a
certain lightness of affective touch which requires the distance
of the viewer and the transformation of the work into a visual
music of abstraction and thought. It is not even to be touched. 12
The ordinary. “These are very interesting moments in
4. our ordinary lives, these contrasting things are played
up against each other without making a fuss. It just happens,
objects accidentally, there and here are my keys and my things.
That normalcy, systems of insignificance, that I think are
very beautiful.” The ordinary is the place of appearance (this
is how Cage thinks of sound: no sound is more interesting
than another, “music” is not organized or in some way more
interesting than sound; he finds this laughable) and what
Hermann addresses here is not insignificance but rather
liminal, infra-mince forces, a hidden, or better withdrawn
orchestration bespeaking an agency to objects in relations and
networks. Accident: in its origin a philosophical (Aristotelian)
concept, here meaning not without necessity but rather, of
their own accord, thing become event, as things appear (as
relations, as forms) and so become perceptible, as in relation
with human desire, for without my “insignificant” keys (what
kind? house? car? studio? bank vault?) I cannot get to, do,
leave, cross space, pick up my child, and so I scream: Where
are those damned keys?! and the exasperated frustration
comes out diffused as if being addressed to everything and
no-one, and yet when found we then proclaim in relief, “There
you are!” The liminality of objects that accidentally happen
speaks to this mode of appearing, of finding significance where
one might not have sought it, of visibility shaped by sudden
configuration. To Adamson’s question, “Why don’t you want
the marks of your hands on the object?” Hermann replies:
“Because I’m just interested in the shape and what it does
