Detroit has always been a refuge to makers, hackers, tinkerers, and industrious do-ers. In many ways, the socio-cultural life of the city thrives on grassroots production, and increasingly, these micro-enterprises are beginning to enter into the economic conversation as well. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to tour three Detroit makerspaces: OmniCorpDetroit; Ponyride; and Tech Shop. All three are fairly recent additions to the city’s culturescape, and although they diverge in organizational structure and affiliation, each was created to cultivate making through access to space, tools, and a network of expertise.

My first visit was to OmniCorpDetroit, a member-driven organization of hackers and makers who have recently added Moped Mondays to their list of recurrent antics. Housed in a former spice factory in Detroit’s Eastern Market, OmniCorp is festooned with a chaotic array of materials and tools that have been finagled, bartered, and salvaged for all manners of mayhem and mischief. Next, I was on to Ponyride, a residency and shared studio space whose mission emphasizes social entrepreneurship, community development, and cultivating creative networks. Currently, the facility is occupied by videographers, choreographers, fencers, a letterpress shop, textile fabricators, and many other producers who manage to operate from a workspace that bridges private and communal to mine the productivity that exists in between. Lastly, I was able to have look inside the first Tech Shop established outside of California, built in Allen Park in partnership with Ford Motor Company. This workshop is able to offer hands-on teaching and access to an impressive and well-maintained suite of tools including wood and metal shops, laser cutters, 3D printers, a vinyl cutter, plastic and textile labs, and a mammoth water jet cutter.

This post includes excerpts from each tour along with photographs courtesy of John Lui and Achille Bianchi. Thanks to Aaron Blendowski for hacking B@S.

OmniCorpDetroit: Hack ‘n’ Cheese

Aaron Blendowski, (founding member): We don’t have a mission statement, and we’re going to keep it that way. We’ve all agreed that if we develop a mission statement then we’re done. It’s allowed us to work entirely free-form, and that’s why we have people who build mopeds, sell custom saddle bags, make gelato, bikes, air cannons, robots, and sound stuff. There’s really not a project that’s gone unconsidered. People often ask what happens when someone proposes a project that OmniCorp isn’t about, and I don’t think that’s possible. We haven’t had that happen yet. We’re kind of a group of yes people.

AB: OmniCorp is member-driven and without sponsorship. It’s been interesting to see a number of maker spaces popping-up in this area—Red Bull just invested in a bunch of property to convert into artist studios—and know that many of these well-funded projects tied to corporate sponsorship may fizzle out whereas we can guarantee that we’re going to be here because the organization is member driven. I was just looking in Frame Magazine the other day, and it seems like everywhere you look, there’s some sort of reference to Detroit and how the city is growing: what’s happening here, what isn’t happening here, what people think is happening here. The only way to really know is to come down, take a look, and contribute, and there are more and more people doing that.

AB: We’re doing Open Hack Nights every first and third Thursdays, 8pm-11pm. Most nights we have a DJ here during the event so that people feel more welcome to come in, just hang out, and learn about what we’re doing. They might get a project started or meet someone who has nothing to do with OmniCorp, but that’s the idea: it’s more a group-stop where people can go and be like minded without a bar setting. Open Hack makes it easy for someone to come in and say: hey, can you help me do this? Our members include hard and software engineers, programmers, graphic designers, sculptors, architects, community planners, who are interested and willing to invest their time and expertise in different creative projects.

AB: Jeff Sturges, “Uncle Jeff,” was affiliated with a similar space in New York called NYC Resistor. In cities like New York, people escape into the space in the evening after working full-time all day. In this region, people don’t just have one job and then come here to mess around. People are hustling constantly. It’s not a joke that Detroit hustles harder; I have two-and-a-half jobs, and then I’m here when I’m not working. OmniCorp members don’t just have their one job and come here to tinker during off-hours, they’re involved in community projects, teaching, working as active professionals and then coming here to work on a hobby, do a project, or just unwind. This space runs on individual or small group initiative. Whether you want to screen print or work on the loom that’s currently being set up, we have the space and often the resources, but it’s up to you to get it done.

OmniCorpDetroit is located at 1501 Division Street, Detroit.

Ponyride: Elbow Grease Economics

Peter Beaugard, (board member): One third of the building is traditional tenant space—apartments at market rate, and then we work with a leasing company to rent studio and work space at a very, heavily subsidized rate, essentially 10-cents per square foot. So space here is less expensive than other studio buildings, and along with that, we offer a community for makers to be a part of… As a board, we’ve been discussing strategic planning to turn Ponyride into a model that could be brought to other Rust Belt cities. They call it “elbow grease economics”. Essentially, we want to create a toolkit—not necessarily a distinct plan—but an outline of what went into the space and how someone could develop a Ponyride… Some of the questions that we’ve been asking are: is it a creative incubator, creative accelerator, or just a collection of studio spaces? I think it’s just fine to be considering these questions as you go—you don’t necessarily have to plan in Detroit. The good thing is there’s clear leadership: board members who are helping to frame these issues. Phil [Cooley] was smart in the way he set this up—it’s a low-risk proposition. He bought the building for $100k and retained one-third as housing for tenants in order to pay the mortgage. He knew if he rented studio spaces out at 10-cents a square foot, he wouldn’t be paying money at the end of the month.

Steve Coy, (board member, shared studio tenant, Swagon founder): The process has been really organic. We’ve been trying to define who we are based on who approaches us and how they want to use the space. Right now, we’re housing three Artists in Residence and a handful of Studio Tenants… Personally, I just knew I had to have my program with Lawrence Tech run out of this space because of all the unique resources available here. The project was to engage my students with youth from Detroit and identify unique, community needs. Based on their research, the students created a business related to art and design, and what emerged was an idea to purchase an old ice cream truck and use it to sell design objects out of the back. We bought the truck—it’s out back—and now, we’re prototyping design objects using the resources here at Ponyride.

Zak Meers, (artist in residence): I wouldn’t even call most of the residents here “artists.” For example, Veronika [Scott of the Empowerment Plan] is a business woman for the most part, Bryan [Baker of Stukenborg Studio] has his letterpress operation, and there are carpenters, craftsmen, videographers, and others who really expand the idea of the artist studio/residency. I’ve been here working on this project since August, but Ponyride has been in the works for about a year. The first step was tearing it apart. This used to be a letter-graphics facility and it was filled with obsolete machines and other crap, and there were drop ceilings and raised floors, so we’ve spent the last 8-9 months creating what you see here—restoring the material of the building itself.

PB: There aren’t really any models for Ponyride, and the project is not specific to Detroit—it’s specific to any post-industrial Rust Belt city, but with a different energy than other shared studio spaces. Many spaces are only focused on fine arts, and I think there’s something about this space being about creative and social entrepreneurship; SC: and community engagement;  PB: yeah, it sets this project apart.

Ponyride is located at 1401 Vermont Street, Detroit.

Tech Shop: Dream Consultants

Jason Burton (lab tech): This is a space that is geared towards making in a very fundamental way. We’re interested in hobbyists, dreamers, tinkerers, designers, engineers, product developers, entrepreneurs. The idea here is that you use your membership to access what I like to think of as a co-op of tools in order to make whatever you want. We have an education system here to help you use the facility regardless of your experience—we offer classes and constant support. My position here is the Education Events Coordinator, and my job is to work with the community to make our presence known—work with area organizations to incorporate our activities here into what they do—and to cultivate an environment where we can start getting things done and work out the details later.

JB: There’s a monthly membership ($100) that give access to the space and one-times class that gives you access to individual tools. Once you have access to the tools you can use them however you want. The techs in the shop are called “DCs,” which is short for “Dream Consultant.” They’re around all the time to help with the tools and serve as a project manager, so there’s constant assistance. Everyone who works here is a maker.

Tech Shop is located at 800 Republic Drive, Allen Park.

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• Matters of the Heart and Hand: An Interview with Chido Johnson, Part 1
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During my first visit to Signal-Return, a letterpress print shop and exhibition space opened last fall in Detroit’s Eastern Market, I had strangest inkling of déjà vu. Not déjà vu in the traditional sense of having been there before; but rather, I was struck by the distinct feeling that the workshop, antiquated presses, and even the intern sorting type, had been in that location for decades or perhaps even centuries. Indeed, Signal-Return falls in the robust tradition of Detroit-based artisanal print houses. The independent press is rooted in the early-twentieth century Arts and Crafts Movement when studios such as the Cranbrook Press, (1902), were established in the tradition of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. The small press phenomenon continued into the latter part of century by those seeking to harness the revolutionary potential of the media. Most notably, the Detroit Artists’ Workshop, a multimedia collective that produced an array of printed matter, opened in November 1964—exactly 47 years before Signal-Return unveiled itself to the public.

Where Signal-Return deviates from its predecessors is in the organization’s four principles: teach, serve, connect, and produce. Beyond defining itself as a functioning print shop that caters to projects ranging from wedding invitations to artist’s books, Signal-Return operates as a laboratory and archive, offering hands-on participatory experimentation that simultaneously preserves, honors, and hybridizes the materials and methods of traditional letterpress printing. Further, in mere months, Signal-Return has become a hub where makers, creative producers, educators, and enthusiasts have come together to create work and exchange ideas. In essence, the workshop functions as a network of networks, cultivating new connections, conversations, and communities that otherwise wouldn’t have the context to engage. At Signal-Return, the potential of printed matter to serve as a democratic medium extends beyond the materiality of the page to disseminate through discourse and, (dare I say), intertext. The workshop has some thrilling projects in the works that will be the product of numerous thinkers, activists, and creative workers, engaging with the conditions and reimagining the mythology of here-and-now Detroit.

Signal-Return co-founder Megan O’Connell currently serves as the non-profit’s director, curator, chief development officer, outreach coordinator, and designer. She describes herself an unabashed typophyle, and in lieu of the term “printmaker” she has adopted the ethos of the “press”—a tool, process, product, and metaphor that creates any kind of imprint. I spoke with O’Connell at Signal-Return in Detroit’s Eastern Market on printed matter and its twenty-first century incarnations and aspirations.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: First of all, I love what you’ve done here, creating this hive of activity in the middle of Eastern Market. What is Signal-Return? How did this space come to be?

Megan O’Connell  A printing press, as a shaper of culture and dispatcher of narratives, continually reflects back its context, even after the fact of its existence. It provides a portal into the ideals, structures, priorities, production modes, economies, and material assets of a particular time and place. As a newly-forged initiative, Signal-Return–a letterpress workshop–is a site for the incubation of ideas and a promulgator of traditional and hybrid printing methods.

By design, both physically and philosophically, the project is porous. It showcases a range of presses, an extensive library of fonts of type [acquired from area print shops updating to digital publishing], a retail/gallery area, and an archive. Essentially, it reveals the back-end of production to anyone walking through the doors while offering easy contact with output of the press. The skillful melding of all aspects of the space is the work of designer Christian Unverzagt of M1/DTW, whose printed matter now comprises an on-site solo exhibition titled Artifacts and Identities. He immediately grasped what to leave raw and what to transform in our 3,000 square foot space, striking a balance between old and new. I walked out of our first charette practically pinching myself—it was uncanny to sense a typophile/designer shaping the space and imbuing it with an unfaltering logic.

In assuming the directorship of a press that serves as a cultural beacon in an economically vulnerable, post-industrial city, I am responsible for telling myriad stories. The press is a conduit for this time and place:  residents long to see something created and circulated. Detroit was once a major printing hub, with many of its talented students learning the trade in High School and continuing onto life-long careers, so it is natural that there is synergy around our workshop. I have to acknowledge, too, the interest in the mythology of the city stemming from places beyond the city is far-reaching. There’s something that captivates people’s imaginations, whether they are in Berlin, Brooklyn, or Boulder, when they witness resources being re-directed, new forms of collaboration emerging, and a thoughtful reweaving of social fabric. The press is a model for this, and we intend to claim these phenomena and give them voice while the focus stays on Detroit. On a very basic level, we are sparking curiosity and inviting participation from those within and beyond the city.

SMP: Who are your clients? Are they specifically artists or have you reached a wider public, and what sort of work has Signal-Return been producing?

MO’C:  As of yet, there is no template for any of our jobs: we’ve kept our operations fluid, producing for both individuals and organizations. We get walk-in clients nearly every day, and it gives me deep pleasure to watch someone navigate the space and then proclaim “I want you to make _______ for me–can you do that?” We support them by helping to dream up a format, source materials, and select typefaces and color palettes. We quote out the job, and then, if given the green light, we realize the project. This might apply to a firefighter who has been promoted and needs new business cards, to an organizer of a seed saving project at a nearby Senior center seeking custom envelopes, to a poet looking to publish a chapbook, to a gallery director ordering an entire kit for an upcoming exhibition. It’s a way to honor our community, amplifying what’s happening here without defaulting to the simplistic ‘Go Detroit!’ response.

Conversations are underway with noteworthy writers, artists, curators, and collectors to yield various projects through Signal-Return. There is excitement about what have done to accrue currency in the art world, having produced for The Detroit Institute of Art, MOCAD, Mark Dion, Alison Knowles, and Etienne Turpin, fellow at the Taubman School of Architecture. We plan to serve as the publishing arm for Market Studio Kitchen/Detroit Emergent Futures Lab, opening this summer in our neighborhood. We are partnering with InsideOut Literary Arts Project to promote writers through the 4×5 reading series. Fritz Haeg, who will be working with and eventually disseminating the research of Wayne State University students in the fall, will look to us to produce print-based work. Plus, one of our staff has arranged for a curator from Paris to spend the bulk of August setting up our archive and a special exhibition. Our enthusiasm about these prospects borders on the uncontainable!

SMP: The 20^th century print has such a lengthy, complicated, and politicized history: mechanical reproduction, the broadside, collage, pastiche, and even ‘zines and the revival of the local artisanal press. How are you expanding the concept of printmaking in the 21^st century? Are you integrating new materials, practices, and discourses into your project?

MO’C   As the 21^st century advances, practitioners are concerned with how their work can confirm, provoke, surprise, or undermine one’s expectations. This, for the most part, remains media-specific and context reliant. The print, however, just might possess a bit more latitude to ‘show up’ in new contexts and to spur us into action. I think this is where its power lies.

Some of my hero-producers are those early progenitors of pamphlets, broadsides, posters, theater, and actions that readily dismantled old forms to cultivate new systems: the Russian Constructivists, Dadaists, and Futurists being the primary models.  Based on what I have seen in the past, I cannot predict what the press and its products will look like a year from now, a decade from now, or even farther into the future. It stands as an open proposition.

SMP: It seems to me that by rooting your practice in the press, or a mechanized process, you are evoking the language of industry, but also the craft workshop. Is this an intentional?

MO’C: It’s impossible to be in a city like Detroit and to not consider what “industry” has meant. There’s a palpable point of pride around the scope and caliber of what has proliferated in this place: I find it awe-inspiring. I’m apprehensive about attaching any sentimentality to the idea of the printing press, and will circumvent a melancholy lament of what craft once ‘was’. Rather, the press holds potentiality while providing a tangible connection with the past. A printing operation of Signal-Return’s scale will never match the standards of industry, but it can serve as a cue for what was once there. If I had to choose, I would say that the qualities of our press are related more closely to the idea of workshop than factory.

SMP: What is your relationship to the digital?

MO’C:  An epiphany that I had early on as a producer was that there is something very powerful in being able to see every aspect of a book’s production through–from beginning to end–and that limitations imposed through non-digital means invited me to take risks and problem-solve in ways that would never be invoked by the digital platform. This runs consistent with what I witnessed later on as an educator. As the director of the Typography Lab at the University of Oregon, I found my students craving a kinesthetic relationship to material. Physically laying out type on a galley, imposing and printing forms on the press bed, and collating pages into a book is unrivalled for what it teaches about the totality of an effort—it is a tonic after spending countless hours in front of a computer screen with pretty predictable results, finding yourself pushing ‘print’ again and again until you get it right. The habituation of designing with a computer can train us to rely on default settings and severely limits the range of what might get produced.

The flipside is that if one understands the nuances of analogue typesetting, it is possible to invest nearly the same degree of attention into a digitally typeset composition. One of the ways we can cross platforms from pixels to the ‘real’ is through custom photoengraved plates. They are produced type-high, so printing from them yields a look and feel that bears much the same aura of authenticity of a hand-set piece, but allows for more flexibility than traditional compositing.

SMP: What role does preservation play at Signal-Return, or do you place more emphasis on modifying and hybridizing traditional tools and practices for a new generation makers and audiences?

MO’C: There are four principles at Signal-Return: Teach, Serve, Connect, and Produce. I feel almost ready to add a fifth, which is to Steward, because this equipment, wood type, and all of the tools and materials you see here are only preserved if they’re actively being used. Wood type will get dry, cracked, and will become unusable if it’s stowed away, and, obviously, the presses need to run in order to stay viable. Thus, the stewardship piece is becoming clearer to me.

SMP: What are some of the projects that made you most excited?

MO’C:   Friso Wiersum, an historian-in-residence in Detroit through Expodium, a collective based in Utrecht, came in [to Signal-Return] before we had officially opened. He was doing research on Detroit—taking photos, logging journal entries, writing a blog, etc., while comparing his perceptions to those of his father, also from The Netherlands, who happened to live in Detroit as an exchange student in 1964. Over time, in collaboration with the Wiersums, I distilled the ‘findings’ down into a simple folded poster/artist’s multiple titled Clearly Not All About Detroit, pt. III. It is emblematic of a conversation that could only happen here. On a modest scale, I’ve been able to bring focus to their dual stays in this city—what the elder chronicled and what the son reassessed 47 years later. This publication, the first bearing the Signal-Return imprint, was released simultaneously in Europe and the U.S. Plans are afoot to circulate it in Berlin, Athens, Toronto, and NYC.

Amongst other thrilling things we’ve produced are the Salon, Book, and Bread evenings, which consist of a three-course dinner followed by instruction in binding a monastery-style book led by Leon Johnson. Novelists, journalists, artists, advertisers, film makers, chefs, small business owners, contractors, students, and teachers who gather provide a sweeping look at what others are making, thinking, and aspiring to. Participants are invited back for drop-in bookbinding hours on the weekends, so it’s helped to build a critical mass of some of the brightest and most motivated denizens of the city. They are all stakeholders at the press.

photo courtesy of Jamie Schafer

SMP: It’s interesting how you’ve taken the mantra of printed matter as a democratic medium and really absorbed this concept into your programming and overall methodology. It’s not necessarily about your way of working—the processes and materials of production, but rather, about bringing together a multiplicity of voices to really initiate a new dialogue.

MO’C: Essentially it’s about what it means to be human—part of a community, connected by language and participating in the transformation of the here-and-now. I don’t know of many other sites where this can happen. People tend to feel  comfortable here. We seek to flatten hierarchies and allow the possibility for the participant to become the teacher, the intern to be the curator, and the person cranking the press to stand as a voice of the organization. All of that flow strengthens our case, performs what is important to us, and gives the opportunity to share ownership. There’s this sense of: what might I do? It’s a catalyst for creative people to claim some inspiration, and start firing on all cylinders.

There’s much to celebrate, much to be disappointed in, and much to compel us to throw our arms up about. To craft something that uses the resources at hand to the best of our abilities is ultimately the aim here. At Signal-Return, we shed light on the complexities of what it is to live in this city rife with struggle, without tamping them down or diminishing their import. I guess you could say it is an empathic and evolving project.

Signal Return’s second exhibition, M1/DTW: Artifacts and Identities, opens this Friday April 6, 6-9pm, and will continue through June 9, 2012. This exhibition will survey the work of Christian Unverzagt, director of M1/DTW design studio and architect of Signal-Return. Artifacts and Identities demonstrates the ways in which Unverzagt’s print work traverses myriad graphic qualities and uses, reveling in manifold material options and formats. The exhibition will feature a survey of work including books, cards, press sheets, posters, and other ephemera from a range of projects including those that are long out-of-print. Signal-Return’s retail storefront will carry more than one dozen titles designed by the studio, and a limited edition letterpress printed poster of the exhibition will also be available for purchase. On April 18, 7pm, Unverzagt will deliver a presentation in conjunction with the show.

Addendum: Since this article was published, Megan O’Connell has left Signal-Return to start a new venture, Salt & Cedar, in Detroit’s Eastern Market. Salt & Cedar is a letterpress studio producing custom invitations, calling cards, stationery, booklets, and posters. Their workshops, led by renowned instructors, include traditional and experimental printing, ‘zine making, book structures, and paper making. Within the 3,000 square foot space, farm-to-table food events, a pop-up cinema, exhibitions, dinner theaters, readings, design lectures, and special curricular offerings are slated with a diversity of cultural partners.

Salt & Cedar is located at 2448 Riopelle Street in Detroit. Contact: saltandcedarpress@gmail.com.

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Sarah Margolis-Pineo: I’m interested in the idea of reenactment, particularly in Jack’s Vision, where you reenacted a contentious narrative within the history of colonization while simultaneously reenacting your own biographical narrative. How do you view reenactment within your work?

Chido Johnson: For me, it’s a process of rewriting or reclaiming. With Jack’s Vision, I’m playing Jack (who is described as Kingsley Fairbridge’s trusted helper) and myself, as well as embodying the role of Fairbridge, who was the white child of the European colonizers who had a vision of where the city should be relocated. My DNA relates to Fairbridge, but culturally, being raised in Zimbabwe, I relate to Jack. When I created the film Mutare Mangwana [part of the Jack’s Vision project], I was creating a new monument for envisioning, which historically was limited to one vision, Fairbridge. There was a bronze statue of him that was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth at Christmas Pass in 1953 and removed following independence in 1982. Since then, it has just been a barren slab of stone with a small painted sign reading “scenic view.” There was still a negative element despite the absence of the bronze—even the empty space signified a purely colonial condition.

The location marked the historical spot that led to a city being relocated. The original location of Mutare (now called Old Mutare) could not access the railway that the imperialist, Cecil Rhodes, was trying to build connecting the colonies. Fairbridge’s was a surveyor Rhodes and entrusted his son to search across the mountains for a location where the city could relocate that had access to the south for a railway track. The young Fairbridge and Jack camped on this site as they build a campsite for his father to survey the new location, which is now the city of Mutare. Putting aside the colonial narrative, the site reminds us of the power of visions—the idea that both Jack and Kingsley stood looking down at the valley seeing visions as different as they may have been. I wanted to rewrite that moment—recognize that it was Jack who was from Mozambique, who very probably knew that path, and led Fairbridge up the mountain—but instead of undemocratically documenting one vision as was the case with Fairbridge, I wanted the diverse citizens of Mutare to claim their own multiple visions. So my collaborator, Naomie (Dr. Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo, who is currently a professor at the Institute of Peace, Leadership, and Governance at Africa University in Old Mutare) and I invited people to that space to sit in a chair and record their visions. Originally it was going to be the chair I made for the performance chirem(b)a , but then I felt that it should be very minimal, because I wanted the subject to be the people not on the carved elements of what they’re sitting on, so we chose one of those simple white, plastic chairs that you find in every back yard in every country and we had them sit on that. History is a very non-democratic narrative, and in this case, history is the single perception of a white child within a white settlement. What got us excited about the project was to democratisize history and subvert a site from its negative role into a positive one.

Artistically too, I made sure that there was more than one resolution to the problem. Instead of installing one monument, Jack’s Vision included several parts: Mutare Mangwana, the participatory video; Chirem (b) a, the process of me climbing the mountain with a collection of objects that themselves were very symbolic; and the narrative contribution— Dear Sekuru Jack, a letter to Jack, by Naomie. And the project is still on-going —the video Mutare Mangwana is still growing and people are still contributing to the narrative… there are some key people who we need in the video, and to truly bring the performance to everyone, we want to have the white plastic chair cast in bronze so anyone could use their cell phones and document themselves on the site recording their vision. In doing so subverting the role of a monument as a fixed historical narrative into a constantly growing narrative. The monument in its physical form is a performative stage.

SMP: Do you consider yourself a performance artist? What is the relationship between performance and object making in your work?

CJ: I’m totally an object maker. To consider myself a performance artist, I am very naive performer, because it was more that I had to climb to the top of the mountain. It was a very raw, very direct experience. I wasn’t thinking critically of performance art. Chirem(b)a, for example, was a raw need to connect with the experience of me as a kid climbing that mountain all the time. It was something that I was already connected to. I knew that in that case both Jack, Fairbridge, and I had climbed that mountain, so the project was to reenact those climbs… It seems like the older I get, the less I feel I need to intellectualize or appropriately position a thought but rather collaborate or stem new thought from an existing thought. The goal becomes less about its critical position and more about its honesty or realness. My process becomes less about whether the work is performance, installation, site specific but rather enacting my natural role as a little kid—the ways I used to play and the ways I would brainstorm and maintain curiosity about my role within daily life, connecting myself to the existence around me. I grew up in very political space, and the process of trying to find pleasures within it, and so I keep going back to puppets because that’s what I used to do as a little kid. Maybe that’s where the humor comes in, through the performance– not necessarily through its expression but maybe through its oddity. My background was in traditional figurative expression, carving in stone and wood, so I love the craft of things, but equally, I love the pleasure that comes from the interactions and activation between those “things” and people.  I am more interested in how the objects perform.

SMP: Had you worked in Zimbabwe as a professional artist before this project?

CJ: When I was 17, I came to the USA for school and had serious culture shock issues, so I went back to Zimbabwe for a year, and that’s when I began carving stone with an amazing sculptor who became my mentor, Tapfuma Gutsa. I visited once more when I was an undergrad in 1994, and since then, I could not really afford to easily. When I was awarded the Kresge Fellowship, I was finally able to go back in 2010 and 2011. It was an amazing experience! I am presently collaborating with my friend Naomie I mentioned earlier and another friend who joined our project, Kumbulani Zamuchiya. Besides the economic struggle in Zimbabwe, the art scene is very much alive.

SMP: Hybridity is a term that is often applied to your practice. Given that so much of your work addresses your biography and childhood, I’m curious how you addressed your own hybridity presumably before you even knew what that meant? How did you address identity as a young person and how did you eventually realize that the in between-ness of your hybrid identity provides a productive place to work from?

CJ: I grew up always being the other. Someone from another place. As an adult, I have connected with friends who grew up similarly though on the flipside. It is more common then we imagine, yet culturally still slowly accepted. With me, the question of othering wasn’t an issue until I came to the States. It was very simple growing up: the whites were fucked up. That was it. They had an unbalanced superiority complex, probably originating from the fact that the entire west was fucked up—President Reagan was in office when I came! As a child, I spoke Shona as my first language and it was later that I learned English.  It was only coming here that I realized that I’m white. Really white. It was shocking. It seemed much easier to drift between cultural spaces in Zimbabwe, in which I was already living in, and finding meaning or existence between complexities and tensions. It felt like as soon as I came to the USA I was immediately confined to my physical identity and not my social political or cultural perceptions. This is not to undermine my won personal struggles of being different growing up, but rather to embrace those struggles as well as the evident struggles of change existing around me. At the time Zimbabwe was a post-revolutionary state, a free country redefining itself from an oppressive minority rule that claimed a colonial cultural hierarchy. Subversive western culture that defied power systems such as hip-hop and reggae were really popular. Hell, I was into break-dance and basketball in high school in rural Zimbabwe.

I guess what I am trying to emphasize is that I do not want to necessarily idealize the hybrid, like in music, its easy to talk about the mixing, but we have to remember it comes from cutting, which is a violent act. So the hybrid to me is like blues music, dancing to lyrics of struggle. We all experience how media, mass culture, and social political systems marginalize us – I’m interested in those spaces of conflict that divides us, and hopefully reveal the beauty that connects us. That point of tension can be the point that’s exciting—full of possibility and new experiences of understanding.

SMP: Is this why you’re drawn to collaboration and bringing together diverse viewpoints?

CJ: Very much so!

SMP: How do you see your role as an organizer? How do you control the chaos of collaborative projects?

CJ: I realize that doing this stuff, I can’t plan everything. I need to be open or else I turn into a director, and I’m learning how to accept chaos. Some of my work has more of a sense of authorship and I do still craft objects, but it all comes back to the puppet and its role in the narrative. I did this show two years ago at Oakland University called Domestified Angst Second Recording, which was very rooted in my personal struggles of culturally assimilating. It was difficult to explain, as it was directly questioning here and there (Zimbabwe). I almost felt like I didn’t have an audience that understood what “there” meant. Not everyone understood the statements I was making because you need someone who has really experienced both to connect the two positions as well as the in between. It turned into almost an educational or didactic thing— the process of unpacking the layers. Kresge really did help quite a bit by allowing me to go back [to Zimbabwe]. When I was there, I was able to look at “here” differently. The meaning of place became something very new to me. Another really being impact of that exhibit was I had studio assistants for the first time. The final install of the work was not done by me but by artists that I truly trusted with my work. During that install I was teaching in Sweden, so as much as we planned everything out ahead of time, then skyping while I was there, I still felt like an audience when I finally walked into the installation. I finally understood what Amar Kanwar meant when talking about his piece a year earlier titled The Lightning Testimonies, as what he learnt from the work. I finally felt I was able to listen to my work. A major part of that is the work already had an existing rich conversation before it was installed. Those conversations existed between these artists assisting me (Vince Troia, Nate Morgan, Kevin Beasley, Kurt Greene) the curator Dick Goody and I before it was open to a wider audience. As much as I was the author of the work, it had already expanded beyond my initial internalized conversation and externalized it. This was very enriching and I realized how rewording it was working with others. The work exists as a shared point of inquiry between things and between makers. I think soliciting this conversation among different identities became more rewarding to me as a searcher and as a quest. Here, I’m trying to pose and open questions whereas before I was giving out statements and telling people how I felt and presenting how I looked saw the world. Working collaboratively externalizes personal narratives and reveals shared perceptions.

SMP: It seems as though the journey is a reoccurring theme in your work, thinking particularly of Jack’s Vision and your Detroit-based project, Dance for Diego. At the conceptual level, how does the journey factor into your practice

 CJ: Detroit is the longest I’ve lived in one place, and even so, the spaces I physically occupy feel psychologically like a hotel—a comfort that feels transitional. It comes down to this idea of moving, not being rooted, and constantly searching for something. The Woodward Avenue projects are the most specific to the city. My Pink Caddi was about relocation, while the Woodward Avenue Wire Car Cruise was about a cultural celebration—it was about the phenomena of that performance and the poetry of the wheels rolling down that actual road, similar to the way that Jack’s Vision is about being on that same sacred land. People looked at those cars like they were magic, and they weren’t considering the economy at that moment. Diego [Rivera]’s mural depicting workers from diverse ethnic backgrounds working together on the assembly line was in reality bullshit. But it was this vision of a city whose diversity Diego saw represented the city that inspired me to work with many different communities in the city and get them to come and participate. It was about the diversity of Detroit—Detroit as Diego imagined and painted, and realizing that vision today with all of us together here. But back to your question, I realize I never really investigated the journey physically, or at least consciously. It has more been about a cultural psychological journey.

SMP: Do you have any plans to continue working in Africa?

CJ: Right now, I’m working very hard to bring two artists here from Zimbabwe by teaming up with Mitch and Gina with the Power House Project. Detroit has had rich interactions with artists predominantly the East and West coast, and Europe, it is about time we artists coming in with different cultural lenses. There are such assumptions about African artists, but so much of the work produced by friends and collaborators in Harare share certain similar aesthetics such as installations made from found material. There’s a great deal of conversation about this type of work, but it all comes from a very western tradition. It’s about time we had artists coming in who give a diverse perspective about Detroit and the experience of this city.

Chido Johnson is the head of sculpture at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, and was a 2009 Kresge Fellow.

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Nina Bianchi, "I Remember Nothing"

The Love Librarian is in. Another Valentine’s Day may be behind us, but Detroit-based artist Chido Johnson still wants to talk about love. For the month of February, Johnson is the official Love Librarian of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), cataloging, digitizing, and facilitating public engagement with his ongoing project, Let’s Talk About Love Baby, a growing collection of artist-made romance novels. Since its founding in 2008, the Love Library has expanded from Detroit to include branches in Chicago, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia. Each chapter has its own resident Love Librarian whose task is to invite a group of artists, (who in turn have invited additional artists), to contribute a book to the burgeoning collection.

The current Detroit archive consists of works from artists and collectives who cross all media and cultural demographics, and their variable portrayals of love and romance range from the steamily satirical to the unnervingly intimate. “Heart Abortion” by Suite42, (Danielle Julian Norton and Tarrah Krajnak), is an homage to art world-induced heartbreak bound in the pages of Artforum; Scott Johnson’s “Guilty Love,” is a volume whose pages literally reflect the reader-as-author bound in narcissistic self-love; and Ed Brown and Annie Reinhardt’s dual volumes, “Birds + Shell,” consist of a cassette and player housed in a pair of two unassuming covers of Danielle Steele paperbacks. Each book when ensconced en masse is equally compelling, and upon closer examination, the works reveal maker, collector, and reader as agents bound by an affection for, well, affection, in all its mysterious and salacious incarnations.

The Love Library was born from a time of crisis. Creator Chido Johnson sought to address the violence and devastation of the current moment with a project that could serve as a generative counterpoint—love being a force that similarly leads to undoing and affect. Exploring a subject that many would consider taboo in the context of academia and fine art, Johnson ventured beyond the pop precedent of Robert Indiana, the unsubstantive sparkle of Damien Hirst, and even the digitally-networked quotidian community of Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More. Indeed, Let’s Talk About Love Baby is a different brand of cheese altogether. Johnson’s library reminds us that universality doesn’t preclude difference, and sometimes quirkiness can be found in cliché.

I spoke with Chido Johnson, Love Librarian, in residence at MOCAD.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: So, let’s talk about love. How did this project begin, and how is love as a subject significant for you?

Chido Johnson: The idea for Love Library [Let’s Talk About Love] began when I was teaching in Sweden in 2008. This was just when violence in the Gaza Strip was escalating, and when Zimbabwe—where I was born and raised, was going through a horrific time. An image that has stayed with me from that moment is news footage of a doctor amidst the shelling in Gaza being interviewed live by a friend who worked for the Israeli TV. While he was being interviewed about the conflict, he was told that his family—his daughters were just killed by Israeli shells. It was crazy. At that time, I was thinking that as an educator we don’t talk about love, sex, or religion, and for whatever reason, these are all no-nos in an academic setting; instead, we talk about psychology and identity, and I felt like we were missing the meaty stuff of life. Later, talking about this issue with one of my colleagues in Sweden, I knew I wanted to address this idea. I was moved by it.

Suite42 (Danielle Julian Norton and Tarrah Krajnak), "Heart Abortion"

SMP: Why the form of the romance novel?

CJ: I was raised in rural Zimbabwe where we didn’t have television. My mom was a medical doctor and for her downtime she would read Mills and Boons, which is the British version of Harlequin— novels that are more toned down and more romantic than the very hot, highly sexualized versions that are over here. Really, it was the only form of entertainment, and I used to read at least one romance book a week.

This romance novel project is a way to address the cheesiness of love—how it’s perceived as a cheesy subject, packaged in cheesy formats like the Harlequin novel and the top-forty movie. I had to address the work in a totally cheesy way—I embraced the cheesiness. The thing about the romance novel is you tend to discount this shelf immediately for its cheap paperbacks—as a one-night stand kind of experience, but then, if you really let yourself go into the project, you can be caught. The love story is human.

My work has been always curious about othering and the formation of assumptions—assumptions of self and of other. The idea is to look down the shelf and see all of these homogenized objects. It’s only when you pick one out and spend some time with it that you realize that it’s so different. It was really important to the project that this work was not made by me, rather, I invite people to participate in it. It had to be about the collectivism, and it had to be about the assumptions of the similar and the shock of the differences. We are enriched by our differences, not by systemized similarities. That’s what I really wanted to push with the project.

Matty Klienberg, "Gods and Bodices"

SMP: It’s interesting, because as you rightly point out, there’s a distinct stickiness between numerous elements within the work including: fantasy and reality, serial and singular, and ephemeral and eternal. Can you speak more to the objecthood of this work?

CJ: Yes, this project definitely speaks to the book and its perceived temporalness. These objects here are very much alive —in touch, caress, smell—yet in our present time, books have become the object of nostalgia almost similar to a hand written letter. So that physicalness was very important too, and I think that’s why I specifically called out to artists who would approach work so differently, but are very conscious of the physical nature of objects. Each book is a very physical experience.

Growing up, my father was an artist—a political activist and a puppeteer. As a child, I really enjoyed making puppets, and for me, a puppet has a defined role and function. It has a purpose, a cultural function. So i see the work being very raw, naked to its actual role, thus very real, and not dependent on an existential narrative. It’s an object that is what it is—it exists through a performative act, not through its fabricated narrative. I see traces of that here in the Love Library, and also in the project in the next gallery, [Laugh Detroit].

Scott Hocking, "The Golden Ass"

SMP: I’m also interested in the collaborative aspect of this project. Primarily, you solicit the participation of artists contributing to the work, but then you also have the continued activation of the project through the lending library and the physical interactions with the viewing/reading public. First, can you speak to the logistics of participation in this project—is there an open call, for example? And more generally, what does participation bring to your practice overall?

CJ: There’s no open call, and it’s up to the Love Librarians to extend the invitations to artists to participate. All the people who I initially called are people who I totally admire and respect. I called them individually, and then I told each one that they could in turn invite one person to participate. That’s how it grew, and now in all the different chapters—Chicago, Addis Ababa, [Ethiopia], St. Louis, Harare, [Zimbabwe]—the librarians there can extend their own invitations to allow those chapters to grow. It’s amazing how it slowly creeps and expands. Looking at these shelves, I know everyone here is so intimately connected and there’s so much love and respect that exists here. I wanted to keep the project real that way, the feeling of a community.

On top of that, I guess, as any artist tries to do, I always try to question the ways we present work and how we interact with an audience. What I really enjoy about the idea of a library is that is that it’s not an immediate, total experience—it’s a changing space that has to be constantly interacted [with], and it’s intimately interacted [with]. I like that it’s not being perceived as art, so people can perform the work and have a natural experience rather than a trained experience. At first I thought that I would have the public check-out books, but right now, books are still coming, so I’m here every day cataloging. I’ve held back from checking-out books because now I’m very protective of all the books in the show.

Daniel Alemayehu, "Ethiopia"

I’ve been starting to think about that. It’s gotten to the point now where it’s a project that I feel honored to be a part of, but it’s a lot of work. I do everything: run the website, self-sponsoring, ship books back and forth, so I’ve been starting to think of what to do in the long term. It’s a responsibility I have now—it’s not just a project, it’s a responsibility, and these are really precious books.

SMP: What struck me immediately about this project is its seriousness. Despite the cliché fantasy of romance novel, by in large, these artists presented very real, very moving, very intimate narratives through making these objects.

CJ: That’s what shakes me up! A friend of mine—that colleague in Sweden who I mentioned earlier, she passed away last year. Her book is a copy of Romeo and Juliet; she removed all the text except for the words that bind. The pages are sort of translucent, so as you flip through the experience of it is almost like a river—like water, but it’s still mapped out as the pages were, so there is an internal order. She did this book in honor of a friend of hers in Sweden who was a Fluxus artist who passed away at that time, and since the artist’s own passing, this has become a truly powerful piece. I remember sitting down in Ethiopia meeting a group of artists and introducing the project. In the beginning, I have my rap about the project: this is what it’s about, it’s all about love, etc. But then when the work actually happens, every time, it’s totally moving. It’s then that the realness occurs. People tell their stories. There’s one couple: he’s in Ethiopia, and she is attending school in Texas. Since the day they’ve been married, they’ve been separated by a great distance with no funds to travel. They’re book is a collection of emails sent back and forth across the globe during their separation.

Love is something that’s trapped in us. The world is in such a state now, that’s it’s almost like we have to hold on to something—some sense of realness. We’re at the height of crisis, and people become overrun with emotion. Really, we need love.

Kate Daughdrill, "Sprout"

Chido Johnson is the head of sculpture at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, and was a 2009 Kresge Fellow. Currently, he is the Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) as part of the Department of Education and Public Engagement Space Residency, where the artist has installed his Love Library and will be serving as head librarian. On Sunday Feb. 19, 12-4pm, Johnson will facilitate “I Love You and Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!” as part of Laugh Detroit, also on view at MOCAD.

This interview is part one of two. On Thursday March 2, Bad@Sports will post part two of Sarah Margolis-Pineo’s interview with Chido Johnson.

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• Learning from the Work: A Follow-Up Interview with Chido Johnson
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One thing I’ve realized since moving to Detroit is that the city is like an island. I suppose in some ways all cities relate to each other socially, culturally, and politically like bodies in an archipelago, but Detroit, more than any other place I’ve experienced, has the distinct feeling of a world apart. This very modernist sensibility of the city as an autonomous space is expressed visually by Detroit’s unearthly postindustrial cityscape, and is manifested culturally by a make-do spirit that fosters creativity, experimentation, and generally imagining things to be otherwise. In many ways, Detroit exists in a vacuum, so consumed by its own issues that it overlooks the happenings in neighboring cities closer than its own suburbs, namely Windsor, Ontario.

In essence, Windsor is Detroit’s Canadian counterpart— a city irrevocably hit by the decline of the auto industry that now has fallen victim to benign neglect. Windsor, like Detroit, has cultivated a vibrant creative community anchored by various academic and cultural institutions. One artist-led collective, Broken City Lab, has taken on the task of making things better, starting with Windsor and progressively reaching out to other Canadian rust belt cities.  Through multidisciplinary projects and civic interventions, the collective has adopted the city itself as a laboratory, unpacking locality and invoking alternatives through community-based social practice.

Broken City Lab’s activities include research, writing, workshops, participatory projects, and interventions. Recently, the cohort coordinated a conference on collaboration and social practice entitled, Homework; painted the words, As of 2011.09.21, We are Alive and Well, on a Windsor-owned parking lot; published two books containing texts, proposals, and projects to complete the long-term research endeavors How to Forget the Border Completely and Save the City; and held an informal City Counseling Session where the Lab projected the meeting notes on the exterior of Windsor’s City Hall. What first brought the collective to my attention was a project that directly provoked Detroit from the Canadian border. Cross Border Communication was a series of messages, including “We’re in this together,” projected on the Windsor waterfront aimed at Detroit.  The medium of Cross Border Communications invoked Jenny Holzer, but the messages were much more to the point, optimistic, and humorous than any twentieth-century text-based predecessor. This attempt to break down walls, whether between cities or between neighbors, is truly the crux of Broken City Lab’s praxis. The predominant medium of this work is collaboration and discourse—what Gregory Sholette has termed creative dark matter, which allows for experimentation, tactical subversion, and community-based political intervention.

I spoke to the founding members of Broken City Lab in their home in Windsor.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: What inspired Broken City Lab?

Danielle Sabelli: It came out of a conversation Justin and I were having about the possibilities and limits of protest. I didn’t think it would turn into anything, but Justin took that conversation and ran with the idea.

Justin A. Langlois: I remember thinking that the model of protest had failed in that it never seemed to actively engage in conversation—it just seemed to say no. It all feels a bit quaint now to be thinking about how polarized I viewed protest and any other sort of civic engagement towards creating change in a community, but that’s where it started. I think seeing Occupy unfold has offered me a more nuanced view of what that sort of practice can do, namely, create an appropriate venue and platform for conversations around common experiences and frustrations, and in turn, I think more and more of what we do is something along those lines; that is, creating the opportunities and occasions for conversations around the places we live. So, shortly after this conversation with Danielle, I wrote a page of bullet points that outlined a way to get together and do something collectively. This was also in reaction to perhaps the boredom and uncertainty I was facing doing my grad work in the studio alone. Having a background in music and media production rather than visual arts, it seemed really unproductive to me to spend so much time in isolation, only to talk about what I had done rather than what I was doing, so I’m quite sure that this page that I wrote in response to a conversation about protest was also driven by me looking for a different way through my MFA. Anyways, I titled this document Broken City Lab and went about recruiting a few other students. We started with the idea of teaching one another skills and experimenting on developing these small-scale tactical gestures, all of which would somehow address the City of Windsor, or maybe more accurately, a neighborhood, a street, a backyard, that sort of scale.

Reflect on Here, Kitchener, Ontario, 2011

SMP: I’m interested in the use of Lab in an art context. Why the name Broken City Lab?

JL: I think it was probably a couple things. Natalie Jeremijenko was doing X Design Lab, and there was Graffiti Research Lab, both of which presented an interesting model for working within and outside of art contexts. We thought this idea of taking different terminology would help us move a little bit outside exclusively art circles.

DS: And I do remember when we first started out that summer, a lot of our projects addressed the fact that we were calling ourselves a lab and took a scientific approach. We went back into our memories of grade-nine science class, and there was this acronym that we all remembered for the scientific method. The first project that we applied it to was Seed Bombs. It was really funny to work through that process and do it in a really rudimentary way.

JL: I think that borrowing from this corrupted memory of scientific method got us immediately focusing on process and really investing in it.

DS: And it was a really good starting point because we fumbled through it. Even though we had somewhat of a working knowledge of it, we sort of adapted it to how we thought and I think that has sort of evolved over time.

SMP: One thing I’ve noticed about your work is that the projects are always ongoing, which is certainly in the spirit of the laboratory as well—nothing is ever completed, it’s always evolving. I’m curious, how do your projects germinate?

JL: A lot of the work is about trying to explore how we enact, think about, and explore locality. So the city becomes one of many parts of this matrix of locality and it spans from very small scale to very large—from people to buildings. When we’re bringing projects to other places, and this has been in the last six months or so that we’ve been focusing on work outside of Windsor, I find that we’re pulling from the playbook of tactics and research that we’ve created through our work back home. As far as how projects get developed, I think we’re still doing what we’ve always done which is looking at what is catching our attention in the city—what sort of makes us at a very personal and immediate level think that this is not working. There’s a lot of: why is this the way it is? And: what if this wasn’t the given and there was another way to think?

SMP: Is Broken City still operating with its original cohort?

DS: Initially there were about four of us. Those same four are still in there now, but we’ve had this revolving door approach for new members. Different people sit around the table and attach themselves to each project, so we’ve had people around the table that we’ve never seen in the past. The most we’ve ever had is about twelve people at one time. Whenever that dwindled out, we were always left with the original core, and I’d say now, we certainly have a larger core. There’s the four of us in addition to some fresh blood—some new, young members who are really eager, and their eagerness translates into a permanent spot within the group because they are so dedicated and devoted to what we do.

Homework Conference, 2011

SMP: Do many of your members come from a studio art background and are eager to do more socially-engaged work, or are they coming from various fields?

JL: I think now, just by virtue of having some attachment to the School of Visual Arts, the last few people who have worked with do come with an art background.

DS: I feel like people outside the visual arts are a bit more reluctant to participate because many people still have a problem understanding why the work we do is art, and consequently, they may not understand their place within our work. I think some people might be interested in what we do and want to learn more about it, but those outside of art or any art background seem to find it difficult to plug-in to the things we want to do and the way we want to do them. Being an artist is a really sacrosanct position, and I know for myself I’ve struggled with this idea that even though I’m not pursuing it anymore, [as a second-year law student] am I still an artist? I feel like that’s a boundary that many people outside visual art don’t want to come within, even though we really try to encourage people from other disciplines. I think by terming ourselves an artist collective sort of deters people who aren’t artists from wanting to participate.

SMP: How does the decision making process work in a collective?

JL: So this is an interesting question, and I don’t want to say much because I want to hear how Danielle sees it happening, but what I will say is that a lot of times I have to deliberately put issues on the table and go around and see what everyone thinks. That being said, I also am fairly certain that anyone who feels into an idea enough and really want to see it happen, things will definitely move in that direction.

DS: Well, in terms of specific projects, most often we’ll talk about the project itself and start to develop ideas and add on to the ideas. I feel it’s this process of everyone is contributing until we hit on it and are all: that’s it, that’s what we want to do. You forget who it was who made that call, but you know that everybody participated to get to that point and everybody agreed that that’s the way we’re going to go. So that often happens, but because of the nature of the group—Justin has been the professor of many people in the group and we’re a bit older than many of the members, and that feeds into the dynamic as well. I don’t think there’s any denying that there might be some desire to look for leadership and in some instances, that really comes into play. When we can’t agree on anything or it’s not going anywhere, I think that sometimes there’s that deference to the natural leaders just by virtue of age and experience. But again, most of the time, I feel like it’s a very natural consensus.

City Counselling Session, 2011

SMP: I’m wondering how you’re able to fluctuate between street and gallery, and how you negotiate public and private?

JL: That’s a tough one. We’re still in the process of resolving that, but I think the project we did in Winnipeg a few weeks ago was the best example of how we can do the work that we do and have it be translated into an exhibition that I’m fairly happy with. Doing street art stuff has always been more fun from the beginning. I’ll always remember that when we did You Are Amazing and Cross Border Communication, every little detail and way of working just sort of synced. Those moments were what it was all about: we envisioned a project and figured out a way to make it happen. It really was a feeling like we took some ownership over that place, and that was hugely exciting. Transitioning to a gallery, I think it comes down to figuring out what we want to do with a gallery space. There are still projects that we have lined up that are going to result in a gallery show. To be invited to do shows elsewhere—even other public projects, is weird because we have such an embedded practice here. It can feel like trying to take the best of collection and apply it to other places, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

DS: Well, I’m personally not so much interested in gallery stuff, and I’m somewhat resistant to it. My interest in Broken City Lab reconciled my desire toward activism and art—it was a new way to bridge the two together. For me, it exists on the street for that to be accomplished. So this transition into galleries, like I said, I’m a bit resistant, but I definitely view it as an exploration of space for us. At this point, we’re making use of space to address what we usually do on the street and looking at the politics within those different considerations.

JL: I totally agree. It’s about the scale of approach. When we were a little ad hoc collective, we could respond to something and then pick up with the next project. Now, I’m interested in understanding what can you do if you frame yourself as a type of formal organization or institution or something, so at that rate it becomes crucial to work through that gallery dynamic because it’s the only way to then move on and do other things. With a wide enough view of what we might want to do, I think there’s a pragmatic reason to consider working through that. But I think it’s a really good way to frame it as a continued exploration of space—not just architectural space, but especially in Canada, this idea of: what is an artist-run centre supposed to do?

100 Ways to Save the City, 2009

DS: Also, if we look at the progression of what we’ve done, where we started and where we are now might seem completely antagonistic to one another.  When we started out, we were more interested in guerrilla tactics. We weren’t asking permission, and were just doing what we wanted. We just went out and we did it, and that’s what I’ve been wanting to get back to. But then, over time, we’ve realized that we can do more if we ask permission and have some sort of dialogue with the city. If we do it legitimately, we’ll have access to these larger things where we can make better projects. So it turned from doing things guerrilla style without asking any permission, to now at times, really institutionalizing ourselves within a gallery. So, one way that I look at it from my background, is I still want to look at it as being the wolf in sheep’s clothing. I still want to agitate and do all of that, but at this point, we’re doing it from a place where there’s this institutionalization and legitimacy. I hope it comes around full-circle.

JL: But I think it has. By getting permission to do huge things like painting text in a city parking lot, the intervention is as much on the parking surface as it is on the infrastructure of city hall. To me, the more things that we do in a formal way—for example, getting non-profit status and applying for foundation grants, these things become ways to push the mandates and boundaries of institutions. It sounds kind of grandiose, but if a foundation gives us money to open an alternative space, their decision to do so will be so much different than anything else they’ve funded in southwest Ontario. Like, ever. So for me, that’s an intervention on another level.

SMP: Can you elaborate on the role of the social in your work? What interests me about the scope of your practice, as you mentioned, you’ve gone from a very call-and-response way of employing text, to now, actually generating your own content through participatory projects. In my mind, that’s what distinguishes a number of historic text-based and social intervention-based work from more contemporary iterations of discursive or social practice. I’m wondering if you could speak to this particular trajectory and also to the role of the social in your practice?

JL: I think that the most honest way for us to speak about the work as social practice is to locate that practice in the collaborative process—the actual sitting around the table and doing the work. The collective is as much the work as anything that comes out of it…Going out and trying to create these opportunities for discussion that can feed into works, it’s always the most challenging, but when it works, it’s really great. I think that as we travel to other places, we’re trying to develop a way of doing this. In Calgary, we were doing this on the street sort of survey of post-it notes, and that’s a very visible thing, but the depth isn’t there obviously. We’ve done a lot of fill in the blank things, and that’s one of my favorite tools because it collects data really effectively and also creates this moment where the person doing the fill in the blank can really assume some ownership over the existing structure. I like to understand our work as demonstrating the possibility for this stuff to happen, and I think of the fill in the blank as a micro-instance of that. At the end, the responses are always the most hilarious as well as the most critical and best thought out. It creates an opening into a conversation, and it gets some of the low hanging fruit out of the way and starts to get into places of richer conversation.

Tales of a Western City, Calgary, 2011

SMP: How do you negotiate the unknown elements of soliciting participant/viewers for your projects and performances?

JL: I’ll say that one of the best rates of response that we’ve gotten was when the communication was online. Our Text in Transit project we got a ton of responses. We printed one hundred individual panels and I think we got at least double that, which was a lot, and that was all through an online form. In London, [Ontario], the research we did there was largely through Twitter and through another form that was on the website—a whole list of questions, and we got about 80 responses. When we were out in Calgary, we probably got about 60-70 people to engage with us, and that was on a busy street. So, I think we’re increasingly finding that if projects require more engagement, one of the best ways to solicit participation is online. When we were in Winnipeg though, we hosted two workshops with eight to ten people each, and they were so sharp, and it was so amazing to get a different level of conversation going.

SMP: Is the lack of face-to-face contact satisfying for you as the organizer?

JL: Well it’s different…I think it’s important to try and get whole range of responses. They don’t necessarily have to be deep—it’s all about the shorthand and the headlines that actually shape someone’s experience of a place. The other thing is that I’m always nervous in some way that some people read the work as a comprehensive and exhaustive survey of every demographic, and it’s never like that—it’s really random! Especially when we do stuff online, there’s definitely a very specific age and generational audience that is cultivated, and I don’t think that that’s a bad thing. The work isn’t trying to be comprehensive, it’s about trying to pick up things that really open up a larger conversation.

Cross Border Communication, 2009

SMP: Borders are a reoccurring examination in the work of BCL. Why have you selected the notion of borders as a point of engagement?

DS: What was our first border project? Was it Cross Border Communications?

JL: It was. We were trying to do this strategic plan that was just like a big mind map. At one end, I think Michelle had written: “send a message to Detroit,” so we had written all these clusters of things, and many of them had arrows leading back to this idea of sending a message to Detroit. From there, we started thinking about Caesars Casino—how there’s this massive neon sign that can be read from all points in Detroit as well as here in Windsor, and we wondered how we could send a message of that scale to Detroit. The concern with borders really relates to the reality that being a Windsorite. Whether you like it or not, we are totally shaped by what is happening in Detroit. Growing up, I watched more Detroit news because that’s what was available. I feel the temperature in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. Windsor has always felt like a distinctly different place in relation to the rest of Canada…

DS: And a lot of people who grew up here, grow up with this fear of Detroit. It’s about breaking that down and having some sort of dialogue with a city that’s closer to us than other parts of Windsor. We found it very strange that this wasn’t going on. We have similar concerns, and yes, we are a totally different country, but that shouldn’t necessarily inhibit any dialogue that we have with Detroit.

JL: The other funny thing is that Windsor is very concerned with being a border city, and I don’t think Detroit is. So, increasingly as we do this work around borders—charts of effectiveness for playing with Detroit, and other simple things like pen pals and house swapping—it became this idea generator that explored how to break down the border between these two places. With our How to Forget the Border Completely book project, its also playing with this notion of how you get beyond the tough looking person in the booth to get where you’re going. All of that is, in my mind at least, is becoming increasingly self aware that these concerns exist on this side of the border and not so much over there in Detroit. And I get it—there are many more immediate things to be worrying about in Detroit. Ultimately, whether or not people consider crossing over to Windsor, it’s not really going to change what’s on the ground over there.

Talking to Walls, 2010

SMP: Do you see culture as an appropriate venue for this dialogue to occur?

DS: Yes, because it’s devoid of any political considerations…

JL: Woah! I don’t know about that…

DS: Well, what I mean is that artists are more willing to talk to other artists about things, and develop ideas from an artist’s perspective that are totally different than from a politician’s perspective, where they’re negotiating things between the two cities at a much different level.

JL: Okay, so I think it’s highly political, so maybe what we can say is it shifts the scale of conversation. This is what cultural dialogue can do—it brings it into a much more immediate sensibility.

SMP: Maybe another way to approach this question is to ask you to address your own relationship to power and politics and the role of art as an agent of socio-political change?

JL: What we want to do going forward and possibly opening our own space is to refocus our work back to the questions: how does art operate? How can artists become community leaders? How can we create a way of working that is no longer an abnormality or something that requires a biennial to be expressed? I think that art is really useful for many reasons. It’s a catalyst, point, or tool for change—it has an unbelievable flexibility, and can approach a wide range of problems. Again, approaching problems doesn’t mean solving problems. I think it’s actually about putting together a coherent or legible path towards a discussion about an issue. So often these issues are encountered as headlines, press releases, or really broad-strokes funding related platforms, and there’s very few opportunities to look at how one approaches these issues who is not in a position—professionally or politically, to address these problems. So art provides that flexibility and when it’s done right can be a really accessible conversation, and I think that’s why working with text and doing things publicly is all a way employing a successful communication device.

DS: It provides for new tactical approaches that haven’t been explored yet. The reason Broken City Lab came about is because of a conversation on the more historic approaches to resistance—protest, etc. Justin was saying that we need to rethink these models—they’re stale and we need to think of new affective approaches, and I was on the side of: it still works, they’re still effective. Through doing what we’ve done with Broken City Lab, I still always held on to that, but recently, we went to Occupy Windsor, and I started to really import the ideas we’ve developed as a collective and how these could be adapted to that situation to make it a bit more effective. I’m still going to hold on to historic approaches, but I’ve budged a bit. I’ll admit that our new, tactical approaches can be in a way hybridized with the old. In my mind I always wanted to keep the two separate—the work we do as artists and established forms of political resistance, and I think it was just because it was easier for me to understand them. But, either way, it wasn’t until we went to the Occupy first general assembly in Windsor where I really started to reflect on that and see where things could converge and we could make this mode of resistance more effective… Looking at the scope of Broken City Lab, the narrative has shifted a bit. When we first started, the story about Windsor was really doom and gloom—no hope, and now it’s definitely at a more hopeful stage. So now we have to address something different since the situation has changed in the city a little bit, so how do we do that? Even though we take Windsor as the test subject and apply it to other cities, there’s also take back from other projects that then informs this new approach that will then be used to address these new concerns in Windsor. It’s really interesting—we take this and apply it here, but now more than ever we’re going to take more from there and bring it back to develop a new approach.

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• Protectors of the Handmade: Craft Mystery Cult convenes in Chicago

Entering the studio of Craft Mystery Cult, I was greeted by a plywood table festooned with ambiguous objects varying from crudely handcrafted clay bowls to scorched specimens seemingly pirated from the vault of a natural history museum. All three CMC members, Sonja Dahl, Jovencio de la Paz, and Stacy Jo Scott, were seated around this collection, which I soon discovered to be ephemera from their collaborative rites and rituals. Removed from the context of performance, the reliquary expressed an internal coherence— the vernacular of the objects linking hand, to material, to detritus, suggesting a connection between everyday practices of making and the more mystical aspects of ritualistic activity. The tableau was presided over by the sanctified portraits of William Morris and Johannes Itten—the patron saints of craft and color, whose workshop-based practices inform the social and conceptual underpinnings of CMC’s activities.

The members of Michigan-based Craft Mystery Cult are all in their final year of their MFAs in fiber, (Dahl and de la Paz), and ceramics, (Scott), at Cranbrook Academy of Art. They established the CMC collective as a platform to explore issues relating to the history, economy, and conceptual framework of contemporary craft. On Saturday, CMC will orchestrate a performance at Roots and Culture that draws from their sacred text, The Hapticon. I interviewed Dahl, de la Paz, and Scott in their studio as they were making preparations for this event.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: It’s my understanding that Craft Mystery Cult was officially formed over the summer in residence at Ox-Bow, but I’m wondering if you can elaborate on the CMC origin story. What strange and mysterious forces conspired to bring this collaboration together?

Jovencio de la Paz: I don’t know that I’d say we formed at Ox-Bow, I think it was prior to that through discussion and writing.

Sonja Dahl: I’d say we began casually working on this project about a year ago now. It really evolved out of issues that originated within each of our individual studio practices.

Stacy Jo Scott: Through a number of conversations, we realized that we had similar concerns in terms of how we approach work. It seemed like we had this shared desire to create a conversation that we weren’t getting otherwise—in other venues or in other forms. It was really from this desire to create a narrative to work from… By narrative, I don’t mean the Craft Mystery Cult narrative, I mean more of a framework for understanding our art historical lineage.

SMP: All three of you come from disciplines focused on object making, and historically, discrete object making through ceramics and fiber. Do you feel like academia, as well as the larger cultural framework surrounding craft-based practices of making, are perpetuating discourses that in some ways are no longer relevant; for example, the Modernist tradition of autonomy, or the postmodern tradition of critique? In what sense were you breaking free?

SJS: I think for me and my experience with ceramics, it’s almost coming from a different direction than what you’re describing. As artists making work at this time, the conversation is so steeped in the dematerialization of the object. The desire to make and have hands-on material, and the desire to see objects manifest from work is something that’s disappearing from the larger conversation. It’s difficult to have a position to work from that seems relevant when everything is becoming more ephemeral. In a way, we’re trying to consider what position objects and materiality still have; specifically, the hand’s relationship to material as a different source of knowledge that we aren’t taught to access.

JdlP: Much of CMC’s work deals with the creation of language; specifically, the kind of language that might be able to house what Stacy Jo is describing, which we refer to as haptic knowledge—the knowledge beyond language. In order to present that or to create a bridge between that and the viewer, we work to create an environment that utilizes strategies that may be familiar from other forms such as text, performance, ritual, music, things to serve as access points to that non-verbal space. We’re really using the notion of the craft workshop as a model for collaborative art practice, which is a reference that is very different compared to other collaborative art practices in that it deals with a very craft-specific mode of production. There are interpersonal hierarchies that are very different than other collaborative groups.

SMP: Going back to your practice that draws from text, music, and performance, I’m curious what you think can be gleaned from the interstice of ritual and craft? Did you approach the project with a preconceived relationship between mysticism and making, and how have your thoughts evolved throughout the past few months?

JdlP: I think a very simple way to describe it is that it’s sort of like a logic puzzle. We’ve created a framework that has a very specific language related to the occult and mysticism through rites and rituals. Craft serves as a parallel structure that is based on skill. Take the Masons for example: as you progress in skill, you gain knowledge in a more profound, spiritual sense. So there’s this parallel, and we were always sort of guided by both. We were interested in the work of Johannes Itten, and his spiritualistic approach to making and teaching.

SJS: One of our earliest references was William Morris, who is complicated, but one thing that he championed was this idea of human dignity—the worker and the maker have a sense of dignity that is lost in certain forms of industrial production. For me, mysticism related in part to humanism and highlighting individual agency rather than obeying the types of beliefs and laws that are passed down by mastery.

SMP: Can you describe some components to the larger Craft Mystery Cult project and articulate the relationship between ritual and performance to object?

SD: One of our performances at Ox-Bow: “In Commemoration of the Death of the Prophet William Morris” really brought together many aspects of our collaborative work at the residency. It brought together the component of collecting—we would visit each of the studios and collect material remnants of their processes, so we had the slag pile from the iron pour, fragments of glass and things like that. Those objects were collected throughout the course of the project, and we were also creating other objects both through the playful re-authoring of, for example, William Morris textile prints, as well as through various different ways of employing the symbology that we had created. We generated all these objects through various modes of making and collecting, and we funneled them all into this final ritual that involved a processional, the building of this pyre in the fire pit, creating a musical, auditory experience, which all happened at twilight. In the end, it really became this performed ritual for a number of individuals that brought together history and research, object making, collecting, the spiritual, bodies moving in space, music—all of these elements that we had been working on for the duration of the project. There’s a real spirit of play that we’re getting at with improvisation. Spontaneity can occur because of embedded knowledge and experience to some degree. We brought to this collective much of our own thinking and making, and because we come without own histories, the spontaneous and inventive moments can occur.

SMP: I find it interesting that this project evolved from reaction— a simultaneous response to your individual practices within a larger academic framework. If I’m understanding this correctly, it’s the interaction of the collective—the coming together of individuals to create a new body and a new interstice from which you can cultivate an alternative framework for making and its related embodied processes.

SJS: Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of that is we have this desire to make together. I come in with a set of skills that Jovencio and Sonja don’t have, so the way I use my skill in collaboration is in a way that they can also use, which means that the work itself is often quite basic like the pinch pots. Similarly, Sonja will lead in dying indigo since she has experience with that and Jovencio and I do not, and it’s these simplified processes that guides the making of objects…

JdlP: …and thereby the aesthetic that they express.

SMP: Is it from the aesthetic that you make references to meaning in a symbolic sense?

JdlP: I think it’s the implied process more than the aesthetic of the object. Pinch pots and one-dip indigo dye are very foundational.

SJS: That speaks to our interest in skill. We’re interested in that moment of skill that is extremely foundational—not skill in terms of mastery, but skill in terms of someones first encounter with the material. In that way too, the aesthetic that we’re developing is based on the desire to speak about that primary moment of skill.

JdlP: So the aesthetic appears always untrained, or primitive, as problematic as these terms are. We are interested in this notion of prehistory, which really relates to the realm of craft in that a pinch pot made tens of thousands of years ago is strikingly similar to a pinch pot that a high school student in a public school might make. That high school student and prehistoric person are somehow linked through the object, the aesthetic of which comes from this moment of foundational, or primal creation.

SJS: A lot of work that one might consider deskilled comes from the idea that a lack of skill is a stand in for authenticity, and I don’t quite buy that. I feel like what we’re doing is somehow different from that—not that that moment of primary skill is more authentic than mastery, but it’s about creating some kind of framework around that moment—that moment has a depth of meaning that isn’t about authenticity. It’s not that the primitive person is somehow more authentic than the teenager.

JdlP: But what’s important is that they share the same moment through making that object. That moment can be opened up, and what exists there isn’t authenticity but some sort of experiential knowledge.

SMP: I often have the discussion across a range of art practices about the concept of the moment of discovery, and whether you’re working in paint or performance, it’s all about discovery on some level for the viewer, and I suppose for the maker as well. Does that concept relate to what you’re speaking to?

JdlP: But it’s a very particular kind of discovery because it’s always available through rediscovery—it’s never exhausted, and that’s where the idea of ritual is also important. That moment is always exciting for whatever reason, which is part of the mystery, and I think that’s speaks a lot to where the aesthetic of our objects comes from. It’s interesting because the show in Chicago has nothing to do with objects…

SD: Before we get into Chicago, I’ve been wanting to mention that something I think about a lot in relationship to the CMC project is the spirit of approaching things with a sense of wonder. When we talk about using basic skill and that primary moment of discovery between body and material, there’s a sense of wonder there. You can appreciate that depth of knowledge of a maker’s body to their materials and their process through a sense of wonder, and I feel that a lot of my experience at Ox-Bow visiting all the studios was a process of cultivating that sense of wonder. To stand in front of the glass studio or the iron pour, or to see them open the raku kiln—there’s a sense of wonder and appreciation that’s very important.

JdlP: And I think it’s very difficult not to feel a sense of optimism through craft…

SD: Dare we say it!

JdlP: …because you’re encountering a moment becoming—a moment of creation—it is a generative moment. It’s very integral to that sense of wonder that you are witnessing a generative process.

SJS: And it’s already essentially performative. We can go see an iron pour, we can go see someone blowing glass, someone throwing a pot—that’s performance, and that’s ritual.

Craft Mystery Cult is coordinating a performance involving the recitation of five devotional poems from the Hapticon at Roots and Culture in Chicago, Saturday December 17, 7-9pm.

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Liz Cohen, from the Bodywork series, 2006

A fortuitous schedule change gave me the opportunity to interview Liz Cohen, a photographer, performer, and pinup, who happens to be my neighbor on the Cranbrook campus. Simply put, Cohen is fearless. Her projects are fully immersive, intertwining ethnography and performance to the effect of uncanny transformation. Often, Cohen spends years inhabiting the spaces, learning the customs, and going so far as to cultivate the body of a certain group or subculture. Her most recent work, Trabantimino, involved a nine-year stint as an auto customizer, during which the artist transformed an East German Trabant, a two-stroke engine-car produced in Zwickau, into a 1970s Chevrolet El Camino low rider.

The car’s nearly decade-long journey from an object emblematic of the communist bloc into a portrait of purely American ingenuity was epic. Physically, the Trabant made its way from Berlin to San Francisco to Phoenix, and finally to Detroit; however, the real story buried beneath the chrome and tawny exterior is one psychological transformation. In Cohen’s project, the Trabantimino becomes a physical manifestation of the immigrant experience—the car’s identity shifting and hybridizing like that of an individual traversing a wall, (fallen or otherwise). Much like Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed (2005), the exterior of the Trabant has changed, influenced by a new social and cultural environment, but its DNA is fundamental. Traces of memory and history cannot be erased entirely, and Cohen’s custom low rider retains reminders of where it initially came from.

Through the course of Trabantimino, Cohen herself has transformed from a recent MFA graduate living in San Francisco to a mother of a three-month-old living in suburban Detroit. To document her own evolution within the world of automotive tinkering and low rider culture, the artist staged periodic photo shoots where she would capture her car and her own subject at various stages of development. Her chosen entry into the world of low riding was through the character of the pinup. From her first shoot, Bikini Car Wash (2002), to her most recent, Zwickau Routine (2010), Cohen has remained complicit with the structure of her chosen subculture to assume the role of the stereotypical hotrod poster girl. Despite receiving a great deal of critique from the (neo?) feminist sect, Cohen quickly accessorized her thong with a welder, a power sander, and other tools of the trade. Her bikini may have been her ticket in, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is contributing to a community and helping to change the very stereotype with which her photography is complicit. In our interview, Cohen mentions that low riding is a culture of resistance. In my opinion, the artist-as-pinup is a similar proclamation of: I’m here, and don’t fuck with me.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: I find the arc of your work really interesting, especially considering that you started out pursuing documentary photography. What was your journey from documentary to project-based work and performance?

Liz Cohen: I went to Tufts with the intention of studying quantitative economics, and I started out doing that. But I quickly started taking some philosophy classes, and I got really interested in ethical theory. I ended up majoring in philosophy, and I started getting really interested in groups. For example, how do you ascribe responsibility to a group rather than an individual? How do you distinguish the agency of a group and the agency of an individual? What are the moments when a group functions as a group and not just as an aggregate of individuals?

from La Cuatro de Julio, 2000

It’s important for when you get into ideas of personhood for corporations or things like that… They have a dual degree program with the Museum School, and once I was [at Tufts] I started taking classes at the Museum School. I had a really great teacher, Bill Burke, who had been doing most of his work in Cambodia and looking at the residuum of the Vietnam War as someone who had been the right age to go to Vietnam but avoided the draft. In any case, I was interested in investigative photography, investigative reporting, documentary, and all the ways that documentary can become more abstract or metaphorical. Then as I left the Museum School, I started doing this work in Panama City [Canal (2000)] where I was photographing transgender sex workers. That’s where things started to change for me. Before I started doing any performance, I was already thinking that it is very performative to be a photographer—that you have a certain persona as a documentary photographer. I think that those ideas probably came to me through all these photographers I liked—by looking at their work, I got to know about their lives. Robert Frank, for example: I understood a lot more about Robert Frank when I learned that I was looking at a photo of his ex-wife Mary, his daughter Andrea, his son Pablo, or his later wife June. There’s all this mythology around his life that is really important to the photography and how you imagine him driving through the United States, photographing Americans as this Swiss guy looking from the outside in. I was thinking about that process as being very performative. It helped me reconcile what the sex workers were doing in front of the camera for me—they were just really hamming it up and posing when I wanted them to chill out and have these blank faces. At some point, I had to embrace that. I think that some of the ideas I was thinking about Robert Frank allowed me to do that.

SMP: It’s interesting, because I largely think of documentary work as pursuing a position of invisibility—erasing the boundary between subjects to lend a totally objective lens. I guess it’s easy to forget about the subject of the photographer, whose identity is being affected through cultural immersion and various social factors. What was your intent with the Panama project—what story were you after?

LC: When I went to Panama I wanted to do work on the US military bases. I was thinking about the relationship between the United States and Panama, and I wanted to do work about that because I think it’s really representative of the relationship between the United States and Latin America. When I went to the military bases they were really boring, and they looked like what military bases look like everywhere. It wasn’t until I started driving along the edges of the military bases and seeing the sex workers that I found something that was kind of interesting—this kind of fringe. But then that just blew open the whole thing, because the work really is about the relationship between the United States and Panama but it becomes really metaphorical, and now we’re into a special kind of documentary, right?! Or out of regular journalism.

from Canal, 2000

SMP: How was it that you first got in front of the camera yourself?

LC: During that work in Panama, one of the sex workers became my guide. Her name was Lynette, and she was kind of the mother hen of the sex workers. I had really short hair at that time, hairy legs and armpits—I had just left liberal arts college! I would wear baggy jeans that I could fit a lot of rolls of film in, a tee shirt, and a backpack to go shooting at night. I looked pretty seedy, I guess. Lynette would always say: “you look so pretty and you don’t even realize it. You’re always hiding yourself, let me show you how to use your body, let me show you how to look pretty. You have a body like a Barbie and you don’t show it!” So I would always just laugh, but she was persistent: “please let me dress you up!” But I always just brushed it off and would continue doing what I was doing. Then my sister was coming to visit me, and I thought: I should take Lynette up on this and hand my sister the camera for a night. So, we did it, and I think in so many ways, I think that it was that experience that led to so many different changes in the way that I work from performing, to the use of my body, to dressing up and sort of method acting.

Bodywork Hood, 2006

SMP: Your recent project, Trabantimino, (ongoing since 2002), is considered a long-term performance. How did you come to this project? Was it a residual interest in groups where you could engage on a macro-scale through theories of national identity, as well as a micro-scale through car-related subculture?

LC: I started having an interest in doing something to a car when I was working on the Canal Series in Panama. I apprenticed one summer at a brake shop: Discount Brake and Clutch in the Mission in San Francisco—I was the Sunday brake mechanic. And I took a class at City College [while getting a master’s at CCA] at night that was for auto repair—for people to repair their own cars, not for professionals. So I was kind of tinkering with the idea of cars, but I was so unprepared for being in those environments. I wasn’t someone who uses her hands, and my parents were definitely not tinkerers.

SMP: It’s sort of ironic that you took to cars in SF—an aggressively green, mass-transit friendly city.

FOS - Fucking Old School, 2007

LC: And I wasn’t really driving there, I was riding a bicycle. But I came from Phoenix, which is a car place, and I have this memory of an El Camino. I always wanted to buy an El Camino and make a low rider, because I love low riding—it’s just the coolest thing. I didn’t preconceive the whole project. I don’t think I could have worked on it as long as I have if I had had it neatly wrapped up in a bow. So I started with the idea of an El Camino and wanting to do something with it. Then I got a residency to go to Germany, and I thought it might be kind of cool to turn one car into another kind of car. I was going to Stuttgart, which is sort of a richer Detroit in Germany—the Mercedes factory is there, and I thought I’d turn a Mercedes into an El Camino. I wasn’t thinking about the meaning of it at that time, it was just an impulse. So I was in Germany and I started thinking about it more, and finally, I went to Berlin and I saw the Trabant. The Trabant was really interesting to me, firstly: I had never heard of it, and when I saw it, it was attractive to me; and second: the idea of it being from the former East was appealing. I was interested in the transitions that people from the former East were going through—that kind of process of becoming part of the West, and the idea that the car has to become part of the West was very compelling. So it was less about a specific national identity than about this idea of transitioning from a Socialist economy to a Capitalist economy and what that requires.

Zwickau Routine: Yellow Push-Up Arch, 2010

SMP: It’s interesting that with such a compelling project that operates on various levels socially, politically, and culturally, that there was no premeditated connection between the cars.

LC: It was only after I had started that I found what was cool about both of them together, which was they both represented these amazing things about the places that they were from. The Trabant is really utilitarian, and the El Camino is really overdone—it’s like one stop shopping.

Trabantimino, 2002-2011

SMP: So, we’ve heard about the Trabant as a Socialist icon… What is the story with the El Camino and its all-in-one-ness?

LC: I think Ford made a car-truck first, the El Ranchero. The El Camino—it’s like a muscle car. In the 70s, with the oil crisis, a lot of laws changed too for cars. I think with it being a car-truck, it got around a lot of new jurisdiction, so it could be a muscle car and a utility truck. I think it’s interesting that both of the car-trucks’ names are in Spanish. After World War II, muscle car culture was really a Ford thing, and that became a white thing. Then the Chevys were more of an immigrant thing—they were an ethnic car. They were less expensive, and low riding became a Chevy thing. The Impala is the most popular car for a classic low rider. The history of it is a history of resistance. It’s the opposite of tuning: with tuning, you’re stripping away and making small adjustments to make something as fast as possible. Low riding is the opposite: it’s ornamental, it’s adding to the car. It’s a way to stop traffic and say: Hi! We’re here! You can’t ignore us!

SMP: I realize that this is a nine-year epic, but what was the process to create the Trabantimino?

LC: I didn’t know very much about cars, and I didn’t know anything about fabrication. I wasn’t a part of any car culture. I knew I had this car, [an “expensive” Trabant, purchased for $400 in Germany], I knew the residency was going to ship it back to the US for me. So the car was coming to the port of Oakland and I started looking for a shop that would take me in—a low rider shop. So I found this shop, Worldwide Customs, that was this kind of shitty low rider shop. And really, that was a wasted year—everything I did on the car at that shop I had to remove later. I don’t know if it was that they didn’t know that much about fabrication, I think it was more that it was a shady place. In any case, I learned a lot about low riding there, I learned a lot about hydraulics—I saw how they were being installed—really basic stuff. I met the darker side of the low riding world. These guys were part of the Mexican mafia, and there was shady stuff that happened there. The way I left was that they called me up and said: “hurry up, you’ve got to get your stuff. We’re closing tonight!” Luckily I had a friend who did car stuff and who had a garage in San Francisco, who let me put the car in his garage. We called a tow truck, my friends came, we packed up all the stuff, and then it was like, gone, and that guy disappeared.

SMP: And at this point, you transitioned to Phoenix?

Liz Cohen and Bill Cherry

LC: Yeah. That’s when I realized a couple things, one being that if I want to find a good shop where people are actually going to help me, that one of the ways I could figure that out is if they were there early in the morning. If they started their workday on time, and if the cars didn’t have dust on them, that means they had turnover. So I got to Arizona and I looked up in the yellow pages every shop that had the word “custom” in it. I started going to a bunch of them, and I think the 38^th or 39^th was this place called Elwood Body Works. It was in Scottsdale, and they were owned by an Italian family. The owner’s name is Don Barsellottiwho’s this amazing guy, and they do mostly insurance work and collision repair, so they have a lot of turnover, they were a serious shop, and they were also doing some restorations—Ferrari’s, they did an Aston Martin once, they were doing cool things in there but they also had cash flow.

Bodywork Lunch Room, 2006

So I knew when he said he would take me in that it was going to be okay—they weren’t going to try to exploit me or be shady in any way, they were really nice, and they thought the idea was hilarious. I was asking for a lot: I was going to be working on the car, and they were going to teach me how to work on the car, while I didn’t have enough money to pay them to help me work on the car. I was asking for the world, and for some reason, this guy decided to give it to me. Then he hooked me up with this guy Bill Cherry, who’s sort of the last of a dying breed of guys who can do a bit of everything. Bill became my mentor, and he really taught me how to engineer all the movements in the car.

SMP: How much of the car is Trabant, how much is El Camino, and how much is custom hybrid?

LC: All hybrid. It started out as the Trabant, and to turn it into the El Camino, I wanted to figure out some things that would give it El Camino-ness. So I picked a few things like the wheelbase, which is the distance between the wheels, the length of the car and the heart of the car—the engine. That required me to build a new chassis for the car. I also wanted to have the car to have a sense of integrity so it wouldn’t forget where it came from. That’s why I felt it was important that it is able to go back and forth. It’s like going home… I grew up in an immigrant household, so it’s like going home and speaking Spanish and then you leave the house, you stretch out, and you put something else on. I wanted the car to have that type of experience, but when it goes back to its Trabant form it’s not really a Trabant anymore because it has been through all these experiences.

Bodywork Steering, 2006

SMP: What was the idea behind the Bodywork component– the bikinis and Olympic poses? You definitely went down the road of gender and identity politics with that series, and I know this work has incensed a number of critics. Are you articulating a relationship between the car and the body with this work?

LC: My motivation was more about how to become a part of a certain subculture. I had had this frustration with Canal: once I dressed up with Lynette, I realized that that was kind of a masquerade, and if I wanted to hold my interest in the project, I needed to become an insider. Firstly, I’m not a biological male; and secondly, I wasn’t interested in going on a transgender journey or taking sex work, so that was as close as I could get. It was done. For the next piece, I wanted to take something where I could go from being on the outside—really being an outsider, to really being an insider, even if I was a freak insider. Different ways to become a part of that car culture are to build cars, to own cars, or to model for cars. So my motivation for doing the modeling was more to become a member—I never did it to make fun of that aspect of car culture. I wasn’t judging it, I was using it.

Bikini Car Wash, 2002

For the early photographs, [Bodywork] I was just using poses from low rider magazines and Sports Illustrator. I did nine of these, and I thought of them as trailers or movie posters. They were documentation for me, even though it was staged documentation where I would have the car at a certain stage of completion, me at a certain stage in my process, and the environment and the people around me building the car at that moment. They were a way to document periodically where the project was at and say: “coming soon to a theater near you!” I knew it was a really long project, so I wanted to let out pieces of it. What happened instead is that those photos provoked a huge conversation around “post-feminism,” whatever that means—I still haven’t figured out what that means! But anyway, the series that you’re thinking about is call Zwickau Routine (2010). For those, I wanted to go to the home of the Trabant—to its birthplace. I had moved to Detroit, so I was here, in the home of GM, and I thought: I have never been to the home of Trabant and I need to go. So I went to Zwickau, Germany and I found the abandoned Trabant factory, where those photographs were taken. I was thinking about my memories of the Cold War as a child, and for me, it was all through things like the olympics–Nadia Comanechi and Mary Lou Retton…symbols of American and Socialist strength. When I was a kid, my parents were really interested in Socialism. We traveled to the USSR and China, so I had an interest, and I had exposure. In any case, I was thinking about the Trabant factory, the Cold War, and the reasons that I never heard about this car, and I started overlapping all these memories of when the car would have been in existence.

Zwickau Routine: Red Cossack, 2010

SMP: Being that Trabantimino has been exhibited recently—last fall at Salon 94, and currently at the Ballroom in Marfa, Texas, does this mean the project is closed?

LC: I think there will always be parts of it ongoing until someone takes the car completely out of my hands. You’re never really done with a custom car. That’s one thing I’ve learned from working at all of these shops. In Detroit, I was at this really interesting shop Kustom Creations, and you see people with these amazing cars come in to just tinker with one more thing. There’s always one more little thing.

SMP: How has the project changed since your relocation to Detroit? Do you find that there’s more interest in the home of GM?

LC: It changes the people around the project and the nature of the car culture around the work. When I was in Oakland, I was really around low riding culture; in Scottsdale, I was at a collision shop owned by an Italian family, but I was also going to tons of low rider shows and even planned a low rider show, so I wasn’t working in a low rider shop, but I definitely went to more shows than I had before; and when I got to here, I was more in this phase of wanting to finish and refine. Here, I got to work around people who were really the best of the best. The project ended not at that Kustom Creation shop, it was with this guy Al Sharp, who’s really amazing—he works for this place Experi-Metal… In any case, as the project went on, every time I changed shops I moved into a higher end situation because I knew more. Also, I’ve been able to meet all these car designers from GM, which was really exciting for me. To have folks in that industry excited about what I’m doing was really an interesting moment, because that wasn’t a group of people who I really thought about.

Hydro Force, video still, 2011

It’s interesting, I think an aspect of the project that really hasn’t been explored by people writing about it is the aspect of me really going through the project over time… It went in fits and starts, but it really consumed nine years of my life. I’d say five or six years it totally took over my life… The Bikini Car Wash, which was the first piece that initiated the project, was really a long time ago. I was this young single person in San Francisco with roommates! I’ve definitely matured through phases of the project, and now there’s a video of me, pregnant, bouncing with the car’s hydraulics. I’m at this phase where I want to use the car to do work that is more family-oriented with my husband and my child. Again, this comes back to the Robert Frank stuff… Just this morning, I was looking at these images where his whole family’s faces are pressed to the side of the car.

SMP: It seems as though you’ve become the El Camino poster child—exuding the coolness of low riding, while embracing the family-oriented practicality of a car and truck in one!

LC: I like working on stuff that stays open. I didn’t really formulate everything it was going to mean and do and be. I didn’t even know it was going to go back and forth between two different cars until I got to Phoenix. It was at that point that I knew more about the technology of what I could do and I figured out what hydraulics can do, so I was like: I can do this, or I can do this. Every year I can say I barely made it through that year, and it made my life really hard for a long time.

Liz Cohen is represented by Salon 94, New York, NY; David Klein, Birmingham, MI; and Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris. She is a 2011 Kresge Artist Fellow, and is currently Artist-in-Residence of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Trabantimino is currently being shown in Autobody at The Ballroom in Marfa, TX, and she has photographs exhibited in here at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, as well as in an exhibition at David Klein that opens this Saturday, November 5. A new video work, Hydro Force, will be included in No Object Is an Island, an exhibition that opens November 11 at Cranbrook Art Museum.

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Chernobyl Series, Nuclear Family, 2008

I feel like I’m on a bit of a mission to prove to Bad at Sports readers that not all Detroit artists trespass into abandoned buildings, cultivate urban prairie, or become beekeepers to create work in this city. Admittedly, tactics of urban intervention are a integral aspect of the cultural life of any locality, but in the D, activities based in studio practice can be provocative, and even subversive, without any bulldozing or breaking-and-entering. I was eager to interview Sarah Wagner, a sculptor who recently returned to Detroit by way of the Bay Area and most recently, Chicago, where she was teaching in the fiber department at SAIC. Sarah is admittedly a studio-based practitioner, who crafts intricate environments from the space of the gallery—entire ecosystems for the imaginary, populated by botanical and biological specimens that nearly float away with uncanny ethereality. Her most recent series of Wormwood Cats are a collection of laser-cut wooden skeletons rendered with meticulous anatomical precision, that are overlaid with a fine skin of marigold yellow Chinese silk organza. Wagner’s Cats are icons of human-made disaster—residuum of the atomic meltdown at Chernobyl that left a trail of biological mishap in its wake. The sculptures are not a pessimistic portrayal of the clash between human and environment, but rather, a positive look at the process of renewal, and the ability of some species to thrive amidst catastrophe.

Wagner’s work exists in a delicate balance between real and imaginary, exterior and interior, city and studio. She is able to create alter-universes from the space of the gallery, yet traces of reality inevitably emerge from amidst the illusion. Beginning in the summer of 2010, Wagner and her husband Jon Brumit, who is also an artist and recently appointed Director of Public Engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, started Dflux, a residency program that falls under the framework of Creative Commons. The couple invites artists to engage with the city of Detroit and the immediate Hamtramck Heights/Banglatown neighborhood using the landscape and culture as the basis for a summer-long investigation. The residency operates from the space of their $100 house—a purchase made legendary by 20/20 and other mass media outlets in 2008, which can take partial credit for initiating the (some say speculated) romance between artists in search of low-cost housing and Detroit.

So, yes, this interview begins with a discussion on the housing crisis, arson, and what it means to buy a house for $100. No matter how thick those studio walls are or how many locks separate the inner sanctum from the street, (three at DFlux!), it’s tough not to let a bit of Detroit in. Sarah and I spoke recently over tea in the DFlux kitchen.

The DFlux Kitchen, 2011

SMP: So, we’re in a pretty famous house. Just to get it out of the way: You have to tell the story—what does a $100 house look like?

SW: We bought the house in 2008, December—we were both working down in Miami at Art Basel, and Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope [of Design99] sent us a picture all graphic-designed up: 3323 Lawley, $100. They had walked through the house, and it was structurally sound with the exception of one 2×4 that had been busted when the firemen cut the hole in the roof. Two fires had been set here, probably by the tenants as a way to get out of the mortgage, because we know they were both arson—you can actually tell by the way the fluid hits the ground in a perfect circle, which indicates the use of some type of accelerant. So there were two fires—one in the front bedroom, and one in the living room, so the house was just a mess when we first got it. There was paint coming down from the ceiling, and all these just amazing surfaces. We promptly found out after we closed that I was pregnant, so we had to make sure the lead was out. We probably would have sealed the paint in otherwise to preserve those amazing surfaces. Basically, we demoed the whole thing. There’s a bit of original plaster that’s still there, covered up by drywall but we’ve made a huge changes within the floor plan due to the damage. There was a bunch of water damage—for two years there was a hole in the roof, and the damaged planks had to be removed, but now we have this kitchen counter as a result—the countertop is from the rafters.

SMP: But the media makes buying a house in Detroit seem so appealing!

SW: What we hear a lot now is: Oh, I hear there are artists buying all the houses and it’s a movement! It’s been really interesting watching the shift of the perception of Detroit in the media because before we even bought the house—the day we closed on it—was the day the $100 house piece aired on 20-20. It’s been a really bizarre and very educational experience… There was this media blitz, [NYTimes, CNN, ABC… It’s endless!], and everyone was contacting us and wanting to talk to us, and it was weird because I was pregnant and I didn’t want anyone to know. All the comments were difficult to take, for example many people said that no one with kids would ever move into this neighborhood… I feel like 20-20 actually did a really good job—I didn’t expect them to spin it in the way that they did because they wanted it to be the “feel good” segment at the end of the program, but they spun it in a more authentic way. They used a quote to describe it that was something along the lines of it being something really good out of something really horrible—this isn’t just, like: Woo hoo! Buy a house for $100! Well, it is, but this is the only way that Jon and I could have bought a house. We have never had enough money to buy a house.

SMP: Is this the housing-crisis iteration of the American Dream?

SW: It is for us, I guess. And this is a city of the American Dream, and this is a city that everybody loves to mythologize. It was once the “most dangerous city in the world”, and now, it’s the “city of artists” in the midst of resurrection. Or something. There’s always some sort of big, big mythology that is really quite simplistic, and that’s the thing about mythology; it misses all the beauty… There’s incredible diversity, amazing neighborhoods with beautiful, well-cared full homes! It’s not that the portrait that’s painted about Detroit wrong, it’s just that it only captures one part of the whole narrative. It’s funny too, because the myth just really isn’t interesting after a while. It’s a great story for a cocktail party: Ha, ha, $100 home, but it gets old. What really is interesting to me is the neighborhood—30% Bangladeshi, 30% Polish, 30% African American and the 10% other, which we fit into, and every single one of these people has a story—a really interesting story, way more interesting than a $100 home. So this was what led us to do DFLUX project, because we felt as though we wanted to provide a platform for people to come in, see, and explore. It was really important that they actually explore and not have their experience scripted ahead of time. We were frustrated with the sound bites—reporters would come in, and they’d claim their interview would be different, but all we ended with was being used for sound bites.

Jon and Sarah, DFlux, 2009

Projects by Finishing School and Wayne Grim, DFlux 2010

Benjamin Maddox, "Habitat," DFlux 2011

SMP: How did you facilitate going beyond sound bites considering these all-pervasive myths? It seems like chasing various Detroit mythologies would be part of the impetus for artists to be in residence here?

SW: I guess by not giving much information so they had to seek it out on their own. In terms of what we would show artists when they would come here, we’d definitely show them the neighborhood—where to get their beer and all that stuff, and then we’d bring them to visit the field. There’s this field off of Mt. Elliott where they razed a whole neighborhood in order to provide a space for development. But of course, no development came, and it has turned into a wetlands. It’s this really amazing place where there’s all this natural growth, which is really overtaking the grid. The roads are still there and the fire hydrants are still there, but everything else is gone. From botanical standpoint, there is all kinds of diversity. The area was residential, so there are all these cultivated plants popping up along with plants that are perhaps natives, or perhaps invasive, or whatever. And that’s what has absolutely fascinated me is the memory, or trace, of what was there before, and how different traces are reemerging and reclaiming the space overtime.  And that was it. That would be it. It became really clear that some of our residents came and wouldn’t leave the house, and that’s just not okay. The experience is not about being at the house, but to be in the neighborhood and city.

SMP: So 2011 was DFLUX’s second summer. How many residents did you take on initially?

SW: DFLUX in 2010 had nine residents, which really pushed the envelope.

SMP: Yikes! That sounds like a camp-out!

SW: It was a camp-out. It was not fancy. We warned people, and out litmus test for selecting people was whether or not we thought they could handle it, which was difficult. We had six people sleeping upstairs, one person downstairs and we had a mother and son sleeping on a porch.

SMP: And how are you taking applicants?

SW: Everyone who we asked in that first round came, which is how we ended up with nine. That was really ambitious, but we thought: we’ll just figure it out. We didn’t have our bathroom ready for three days! That was a bit rough, but it worked. In the future, we’re not really sure. We had one resident this summer, who was fantastic… But it became really clear that we can’t do it with so little space. We’re looking to buy another house right across the street in this auction cycle, and if we buy that one, then we’ll continue, but if we don’t, then I don’t think we’ll be able to… Especially with a toddler.

Chernobyl Series, Nuclear Family, 2008

SMP: It seems as though the engagement with landscape that your residency facilitates is similar to the way that you explore ecological and human-made systems in your own work. How does the shifting biology of this place—epitomized by your field, also inform your studio practice?

SW: It’s something that I’m trying to figure out, and I think it’s a big part of the reason that I’m attracted to the wetlands off Mount Elliot… The piece I’m working on right now is a grouping of five cats.  It’s about Chernobyl, and what I’ve been thinking about is that there are all these animals, wild and formerly domestic,  in the area of Chernobyl that appear to be doing just fine—completely normal—they’re playing, running, eating, procreating, but they’re completely radioactive. And what I’ve been thinking about is how to represent the invisibility of the radiation. So this is the first one—it has a completely normal skeleton now, but the skeleton will slowly start to overtake the inside of the form.

SMP: In essence, these are ghostly traces of radiated creatures that will change form overtime?

SW: Yes. And they’re dyed with turmeric, because it’s a bad dye—meaning, it doesn’t keep, so it’s light sensitive. The idea is that the turmeric is mimicking the shelf-life of radiation. And so, these creatures are slowly healing, and over time, they’ll be come white again. I don’t know what that time period is, but they start out one color and they end another.

SMP: Interesting. So it’s not so much about deconstruction or decay, but more about purification?

SW: Healing is really important. At the risk of being very California, it’s really important to me. Also, I don’t want to look at the problem, but to the hope. There’s this military term called “positive ocular response,” which means when there are two blown-up tanks with a small space in between, you don’t look at the tanks while trying to drive through, you focus on that space between–and often you make it no matter the odds. I’m trying to present positive ocular response while still being truthful about the situation. Truth is really important to me too, but truth is flexible… I supported myself for ten-years doing construction and fabrication—including museum building fabrication, exhibits for natural history museums and the like. It was really interesting working in these environments because I came to realize how these institutions of science presented an interpretation the truth–not the truth.  The idea of exploring what’s true and what’s real, and trying to imagine the process by which truth is created is interesting to me, because it is all a product of imagination in a way.

Chernobyl Series, Arrested Development, 2009

SMP: I’ve heard the correlation made between Detroit and Chernobyl before. Is that a comparison you’re conscious of making this work?

SW:  Detroit is not Chernobyl–it’s vibrant, alive and safe for humans, but I feel like the reason I’m drawn to the idea of Chernobyl is that there’s all this hope–living creatures surviving radiation.  But the effects of radiation on the animals is not investigated, and we don’t know what’s going on there, but I really am interested in the idea that this horrible thing can happen and that life continues. It may not be human life, but something is flourishing—all the plants and the species that are coming back, it’s all pretty phenomenal. In that way I feel like there is a link, particularly when thinking about the Mt Elliot wetlands–it’s a place that gives me hope.

SMP: It seems that your practice is for the most part studio and gallery-based. Given your interest in landscape, have you ever done any installations outdoors?

SW: I haven’t really done that. I’ve had ideas for it, but I haven’t been able to manifest them. I love being a studio-based artist, and that’s what makes me different from Jon and Mitch and Gina is that their studio is everything. I love getting lost in that deep space of just being alone, working, and making something. I don’t know if my work will shift that way. But there have been a number of other big life changes—I have this big, sort of, Bangladeshi-style garden that we grew out back– we grew our own food, and doing things like this will surely have some sort of impact . But I don’t know… That’s one of the things about the creative process I guess.

SMP: What is in the works for you?

SW: I’ve got a couple shows… I’ve got a month to finish the cats for a traveling museum show… I’m also part of a “sisters” show this spring at the Ann Arbor Art Center called Inherent State. My sister, Cathy Wagner, is an experimental writer. Right now, she’s putting herself into trances, recording herself speaking in tongues, and developing writing from that. I decided that I need to meditate to try and, you know, be calm, (laughs), regulate my anxiety, and so I’ve been trying to meditate, and when I begin obsessing about things while I meditate, I write these things down on the fridge. As soon as I’m done with the cats, I’m going to begin making all of these things—I’ll make the objects on the list on the fridge and install them in Ann Arbor.

SMP: What kind of objects are we talking about?

SW: [Sarah reads from her list:] Garden; Pollination; Squash; Otto Screaming; Ramadan Plate; Concealed Weapon, carrying, protecting; Otto Baby; 3322… Oh no! It’s illegible, darn… Platonic Solids; Peony; Oxygen Masks; Otto; Cat; Bottles; Window; Cat.

SMP: In a way, you’re in dialogue with your sister’s process but through your own process of making.

SW: Yeah, we’re definitely drawing from the same process. Stream of consciousness to create objects and text. She’s got her craft, and I have mine, so the process will be filtered through our skill set. For the show, we’re teaming up with artist Brooks Harris Stevens and her sister Jen Harris, who is also a writer. Brooks and I have a lot in common both materially and in our personal lives, including having writers for sisters, so we thought this would be fun.

Jon Brumit, Sarah Wagner, and Christy Matson, "Six-Minutes to Dimond Consciousness," Future Positive, Patricia Sweetow, 2011

SMP: Do you and Jon ever collaborate in this way? Since Jon’s praxis is more socially-based and your work is certainly all about the introverted studio-time, do you find that this clashing of opposites is productive (and challenging) in the way that working with a writer is?

SW: Jon and I collaborate quite a bit, and we’re looking to collaborate more because he’s been so busy, so it’s a way for us to get to work together. And I really admire his work, and I think he admires mine, but we’re also so different, so it’s really lovely to have that polar-opposite-ness come in… We did a Life Laws project together. We have this series of Life Laws, for example, number one is: Don’t put your bearings in the dirt. Number three is: Don’t cut a hole in the roof of a co-owned car without asking the co-owner’s permission. These are either things that we’ve done, or tales that we’ve collected from friends. This is from a friend, who was actually at Cranbrook: Don’t wear homemade pants that aren’t reinforced in the crotch and sit cross legged in public… We have performed the laws and made romance novels with the titles.  Collaboratively? What else… Well, DFLUX which is pretty huge, and then we did a show at Patricia Sweetow, [San Francisco], with Christy Matson as a third collaborator. She makes weavings using a conductive thread, so I made sheep that conducted sound art that Jon created. Oh! and Jon and I did a show in Tennessee in 2003 called  Crossover in Chattanooga, TN, which is where we both went to undergrad.  That project was really fun: we conducted traffic across this bridge that has a perfect octave. I don’t have a perfect pitch, but it goes [Sarah hums three successive pitches: looooow-hiiiiigh-looooow]. We discovered that if you drove over in 3-mi/hr increments that [the pitch would elevate harmoniously]. Depending on how fast you were going, you could actually make different pitches. So, we tried to conduct traffic across the bridge to create, like, “Row Row Row Your Boat”… It was really bizarre, because you just can’t control how fast the traffic goes.  We were able to do it on a synthesizer in the gallery, and we exhibited that along with an installation based on the Tennessee River Valley out of construction materials: tar paper, electrical lines—the current was the river, and then we had shredded paper set up so as the viewer entered the space, they came into a pristine environment mimicking what the Tennessee Valley was before it was settled. The viewer was then forced, essentially, to clearcut it as they walked through these huge piles of shredded paper so their trace was left as they walked. The audience then essentially made the environment, which was the reason I really loved that piece.

Brumit and Wagner, "Crossover," 2003

SMP: It seems as though many of your collaborations involve willing or unwilling participants. Is this an element of installation-based work as well?

SW: Um, I think it ends up being part of the sculptural experience. I really love the way, for example, Richard Serra sets up his work, where it’s more about the emotion of the encounter. I want to get that kind of affect in my work—I’m really into creating that kind of intense feeling when a viewer walks in. You know how when you walk in and see one of those stacked sculptures and there’s this amazing tension—that’s really what I’m hoping for. I guess it is unwilling in some way, where you’re just subjected to some kind of emotional shift.  It does require participation.

SMP: With this new Chernobyl series, do you intend for viewers to get a strong sense of lifespan—though the turmeric, or the shifting patterns of natural systems?

SW: The evolving? I guess so, I hope so.  I envision the viewer, the owner of the work really, seeing the work shift over time.  The viewer who passes by will miss this–it is too slow of a story arc.  I guess that’s what I feel like happens in my whole life! The story arc is a long one with many shifting patterns.  In my twenties I approached life as if it was so much more cut-and-dry, like, if you got rejected than that was it—you were black balled. Now I know that rejection is just an opportunity. Now I think: oh, well, they got to look at my work, and you never know what’s going to happen–there is an ebb and flow. I think being willing to submit to things occurring over time has very much about not having scarcity, and not living in that kind of closed mental space. I want my work to exist  in the same kind of place—where there is room to be open ended–to not know.  Because what do I know?! I don’t know anything, I only know what I’ve experienced. There’s a whole range of things on the horizon of possibility that are so out of the range of what I could even imagine. I would have never guessed I would buy a house in Detroit for $100 and we’d go on 20-20, I’d have to navigate all that mass media, and that we’d have a kid! Go figure! And throughout, still working in the studio.

"Invisible Healing World: Echinacea Purpurea," 2004

SMP: What I love about your work is the overall sense of positive uncertainty, which I find very hopeful.

SW: That’s lovely, because I’ve worked towards that. A number of years ago, I decided I wanted to turn conditions around—I wanted to transform from survival into prosperity. And I did that during grad school, and it felt great, so lately I’ve decided to turn worry into wonder… Maybe I’m starting to do that in my art work as well.

SMP: A word I’ve been hearing quite a bit lately is the notion of precariousness, and how contemporary art thrives within uncertainty. Precariousness seems to be an apt term—it’s where your work is, and where Detroit is… It seems to be a lovely synthesis of you and environment.

SW: I think thriving within uncertainty is the only way to go.  A precarious position is wonderful in the range of possibility that is there depending on the way one falls.  There’s a lot of tension there too and that’s what makes life and art interesting.  Our neighborhood is in some ways “precarious” but it’s a space of possibilities.  It’s really funny, because I would be terrible in a neighborhood where everybody mowed their lawns precisely—I wouldn’t fit in there, and I couldn’t do what I wanted to! I can do what I want here, nobody’s looking, and our neighbors get excited when we do something. I like the openness. There are so many places where we lived—Cranbrook is one of them, where it’s so beautiful, but it’s so sculpted–finished! There’s something about our neighborhood, and about its openness that I really, really like. What can happen?

Sarah Wagner’s wormwood cats will be featured in Innovators and Legends: Generations in Textiles and Fibers:

Muskegon Museum of Art: December 13, 2012 – March 17, 2013

Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center: May 26 – August 11, 2013

University of Kentucky: September 8 – December 1, 2013

Colorado State University: January 24 – April 11, 2014

All photos courtesy of the Artist, Jon Brumit, Benjamin Maddox, Robert Beamer, and Patricia Sweetow.

Related Posts

• Matters of the Heart and Hand: An Interview with Chido Johnson, Part 1
• Detroit Hustles Harder: MakerSpace Roundup
• Dispatcher of Narratives, Promulgator of Ideas: An Interview with Megan O’Connell of Signal-Return
• Learning from the Work: A Follow-Up Interview with Chido Johnson
• Make this Better: An Interview with Broken City Lab

"I Cannot Be Saved Without You" at Fred Torres Collaborations, 2011

Leon Johnson is an artist and educator whose practice traverses poetry and performance, film and food. He is an avid researcher into the multifaceted nature of social relations, and seeks to engage with the world at large by cultivating situations that emerge out of myth and (re)enactment. If forced to fix a label to the liquid ebbs of Leon’s creative work, I’d have to take a cue from Liam Gillick, (episode 220), and describe it as discursive practice—a method of art making that involves the dissemination of information, and it looks to the structures that underscore the sharing of ideas as a space of productive art practice. Operating within the discursive framework allows Leon to go beyond the scripted role of reflecting, generating, or denying a problem in his work. Rather, it allows for problems to be projected within concrete, albeit temporary realities, which become situation-specific sites for ongoing interaction.

In essence, Leon is engaged in “the creation of new zones of intimacy and social possibility,” (to borrow from Okwui Enwezor), and he achieves this through installation, performance, video, photography, print media, and the production of discrete objects. Most recently, Leon orchestrated interactive spectacles in Detroit and New York, and he is currently working on a three-part film that will be shot in three locations. Leon is the operating Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the College for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit, and is an aspiring beekeeper. We spoke over the course of the summer by email.

Discussed: Failure, problem-production, armies of unprepared debtors, beehives, Gatsby, Homi Bhabha, Naked Lunch, pleasure producing exploration

Niki and Koki in "Dual Site," 2010

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: I’ve heard you mention that failure is a place to begin creative labor. Can you articulate on that statement, and express how it might relate to your current practice?

Leon Johnson: In that unholy mix of intention, aspiration, reference, mimicry, parody, pastiche, mastery – an alloy that forms the foundation for many of our creative embarkations – we can, at best, produce an iteration of where we have already been, or someone else has already been – there is in failure the possibility for emotional contagion, produced by a not-knowing, and a non-recognition. Here is where the body’s imagination takes over, and creative galavanting for pleasure begins. Failure is where problems worth having are incubated. Where am I? Today? This moment? What have I left behind? Left out? Left in? What scares me? What in the work has activated my emotional curiosity?

SMP: If I’m understanding correctly, you envision creative possibility in the failure to communicate—it is where the systems of language, knowledge, reference and affect dissolve, where compelling work can be realized?

LJ: No, I am not a concerned about failing to communicate – that is never an aspiration of mine, to have people “understand” – but I am conscious of when “what I know” can no longer serve the act of creation – I am seeking for “not-knowing” to take over and lead me into new possibilities, new problems. Communicating, if at all, through process and problem-production rather than product and solution-production.

SMP: This notion of problem production—is this where mimicry, parody and pastiche are incorporated into your work?

LJ: No, it is where I hope to avoid those kinds of reflexes. The kind of traps one sees MFA art students lining up to dive in! Our job should be, in fact, the incubation of variables, and the production of difference. This suggests incredibly vivid spaces of making and learning, if we keep our processes porous and our conversations healthy and emergent via constant engagement. Sarat Maharaj states it beautifully:

“As we can­not quite know beforehand what form this will take–each instance is dif­ferent and unpredictable–we have to be wary about attempts to regulate artistic research, to knock it into shape of the academic disciplines, to make it a lookalike of their logic and architecture. What matters today is its ‘difference’–the distinctive modalities of its knowledge production.”

For the most part art schools are habituated through non-distinctive modalities of knowledge production, and  mimicry, parody and pastiche are set as default containment areas as institutions go about their primary business: the production of armies unprepared debtors.

"I Cannot Be Saved Without You" at Fred Torres Collaborations, 2011

SMP: These “non-distinctive modalities” have been so fundamental to theories of postmodern/postcolonial cultural production, and historically, have been related to difference in the deconstructuralist sense. How can the academia cultivate thinking and producing beyond the postmodern when that structure is indeed the default?

LJ: Students, faculty and administration have to be partners in, at least initially, de-stabilizing the default mechanisms of art history, notions of mastery, and the departmental silo system. We have to migrate across departmental boundaries often and pleasurably. We have to conjure new and exciting alliances – as mentioned above, more creative gallivanting for pleasure! Here, for example, it is critical that the art school be passionately engaged with the city of Detroit – with other artists and institutions, yes – but also with the urban prairie, the people and communities of the city, with gardens and with beehives, with retired auto-workers, bacteria and mushrooms, and all the other remarkable resources around us. Our world of ideas, and relationships, is infinitely richer than a few square blocks in Chelsea.

SMP: I’ve been interested in Nicholas Bourriaud’s recent thinking on what he has termed precariousness, which, (borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman), refers to the liquidity of contemporary social life, and the fundamental instability that is integral to compelling works of art. In a recent essay, Bourriaud wrote: “A precarious regime of aesthetics is developing, based on speed, intermittence, blurring and fragility… The contemporary artwork does not rightfully occupy a position in a field, but presents itself as an object of negotiation, caught up in a cross-border trade which confronts different disciplines, traditions or concepts. It is this ontological precariousness that is the foundation of contemporary aesthetics.” Thoughts?

LJ: For me the speed and complexity of contemporary communications, that produce uncanny new alliances, destabilizes the suggestion by Bourriaud of an order, or an aesthetic location, called “precariousness” – an artist like Vik Muniz and a project like Wasteland convinces me of that. Bracha Ettinger, moving beyond the defaults of empathy and sympathy, calls it “besidedness” – fabulous, no? – that conjures the potential of “almost-impossible borderlinks”. This suggest a rather remarkable notion of what the “classroom”, the “studio”, or the “city” might be for us.

"DEN / PYRE / THORN" installed at Lemberg Gallery, 2011

SMP: I’d like to get a better idea of your process. Was your most recent piece the work featured at Lemberg Gallery this spring? How did this work evolve, and what did it entail?

There were two concurrent projects most recently: the Lemberg project “DEN, PYRE, THORN” and a project titled “I CANNOT BE SAVED WITHOUT YOU” which was part of the Live From Detroit exhibition in NYC, at Fred Torres Collaborations. Both evolved together, both featured a meal for audience/participants, collaboratively produced infrastructure, and both featured variations on performance. The Torres dinner, prepared and served in the gallery, featured a custom built dinner table by Jamie Johnston, hand-blown glassware by Tim Southward and Dave Helm, commissioned dinner-bowls and pewter hardware, and a six-course dinner prepared by a crew of three, Christopher Biddle, Leon Johnson, and Leander Johnson, my son – for twelve guests. This project was initiated finally, after years of gestation, by a fragment of writing I did for a catalog being produced in Canada:

“A tentative intimacy of the kind sketched skillfully by Fitzgerald, as Gatsby regards Daisy; ‘They had never… communicated more profoundly, one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder…’ – but the perfumed damage is not far behind, the sea-moist beard and the bile, the twelve-penny-dagger and the burnt-bone eyeliner.”

I imagined a dinner of intimate irregulars selected from the audience at the exhibition – for a kind of one-night-stand. At the head of the table, it turned out, was Alison Knowles one of the founders of Fluxus, and the author of the IDENTICAL LUNCH project. Amazing! The table with all the detritus, remained on exhibition for the rest of the month of the exhibition.

The Lemberg project marked the 25th anniversary of the death of the French author Jean Genet, and focused on three of his novels, The Thief’s Journal of 1964, Miracle of the Rose of 1966, and Funeral Rites of 1969 – each represented in the gallery by 15 first American editions of each book in a sculptural system including shelves and mirrors. I served a light dinner for 50 audience members, contextualized by a spoken word performance performed by Michael Stone-Richards, Morgan Marentic, and Sound artist, Dan Steadman. The performers were served dinner in custom porcelain dinner systems produced by Marie Perrin-McGraw. The project evolved from my study, and love, of the work of Genet for over 30 years, and in particular his book Funeral Rites written for the author’s lover, Jean Decarnin, killed by the Nazi’s in WWII.

"I Cannot Be Saved Without You"

SMP: Could you speak a bit more to your emphasis on multiple-fronts of collaboration?

LJ: I treasure the conversations I am lucky enough to be part of – and I actively seek to incubate new ones all the time. I consider the nurturing of convivial discourse not only pleasurable, but a critical creative act. All my work emerges from these conversations, all production is dependent on collaborative engagements – some 20 years in the making, and some brand new. The process of making work for me relates distinctly to the “performance” of memory, to traversing the space between the past and the future and, ultimately, the ability to then be heard – even by one other. Homi Bhabha puts it this way: “I use the term the right to narrate to signify an act of communication through which the recounting of themes, histories, and records, is part of a process that reveals the transformation of human agency. Narrative is a sign of civic life. Societies that turn their back on the right to narrate are societies of deafening silence: authoritarian societies and police states”. To remember, to imagine, and to speak are all performative domains.

SMP: Bhabha was speaking to a decolonizing world, encouraging metanarrative and hybridity as acts of resistance. Do you conceive of a relationship between the postcolonial and the postindustrial in terms of cultural work?

LJ: If we book-end for a moment, my first twenty years of life unfolded in Cape Town, and my last 15 months in Detroit. Ok! In my cultural labor the experience of the place-after-colony is always twinned –  a dual site –  the real and the imagined, or the reMEMBERED. The mediating forces between the real and the imagined is my work, often fueled by a vivid on-call-prejudicial-image-index forged in fire, absence, violence and resistance. A strong translation of this for me is the work of William Burroughs, and particularly his novel NAKED LUNCH, and the work done many years ago on this subject by my colleague Peter Playdon. Burroughs describes a market-place called Interzone, which is understood as: “a transitive state, a city resisting total identification either as a vision of a real city or as an allegory of a mental state…neither an inner space nor an outer space…it is a between space, a crossroads at which textuality, alterity, and identity collide.” This dismantling of psychic defenses is imagined as ‘space-time travel’, a process of displacing the unity of the self and its relationship to place into different temporal or physical locations. The relationships between these locations, as social space folds into mental space suggests the production of a performative zone that is simultaneously real, symbolic and imaginary; what it produces is a material environment, a visual culture and a psychic space. I see it as the framework for negotiations I can work out as an artist, as a kind of social actor.

Niki and Koki, "Dual Site"

SMP: To what extent are your performances choreographed, and as the maker/maestro, how do you address the element of chance?

LJ: The performances inevitably develop as devised works: meaning the work emerges from other texts, sometimes many sources, and is orchestrated and re-calibrated.

A process described by DJ Spooky: “I guess that’s traveling by synecdoche. It’s a process of sifting through the narrative rubble of a phenomenon, an “indexical present” Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs and signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like to flip things around. With a culture based on stuff like Emergency Broadcast Network hyper edited new briefs.”

I will give an example of a work-in-progress.  Bruno Abroad will be, finally, a digital video shot in three locations, London, Prague and Naples featuring the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno. Three psycho-geographical drifts through contemporary cities alive with the evidence of both vivid histories and media-saturated “becomings”; three dinners (which reference Bruno’s dialogue, The Ash Wednesday Supper); at each dinner, three groupings of Renaissance visionaries, all victims of the political and religious orders of their time, with Giordano Bruno as principal guide. The three cities are imagined as temporary autonomous zones, Interzones, of radical discourse, ecstatic envisioning, and alchemical resistance. The project concludes in Naples the site of Bruno’s death at the stake on February 17, 1600, in the Campo De’Fiori. This film aspires to track intersecting arcs of power and resistance and is not a historical representation of anything “renaissance” except the politics inherited afterwards. The interests of the Church and the State, in our “renaissance” context, to control discourse and, ultimately, to silence transgression has powerful implications for contemporary culture. It is critical to understand that these voices of knowledge, silenced almost 500 years ago, can resonate powerfully nonetheless. I will attempt to temporarily situate these thinkers in contemporary urban contexts, as trans-time specters in a celebration of the poetics of resistance. While not a “period” piece, it is approaches the form of a multi-plane travelogue. The food, the actors and the locations will be formed and selected in each city – an improvised company – each time, and certainly to a large degree chance-based.

"Bruno"

SMP: At what stage are you at with the filming of this work? Do you often use video to unite performances and create a narrative of sorts?

LJ: The skeletal script is complete, permissions to film at certain sites are in place, and the production crew of three is assembled. Then there are the dreams, visions, and psycho-geographical speculations  - years of image-accretions, memories of the Nicholas Roeg film Don’t Look Now, conversations with friends and colleagues - that will inevitably seep in once on site, and, happily, displace what is actually there.

SMP: Given the thematic arc of Bruno relating to power and resistance, how do you see contemporary artists addressing the notion of resistance?

LJ: I see people living fully, talking, cooking, making, raising children, growing tomatoes, writing books, being conscious of all the other endeavors of their communities, friends, lovers – lived resistance – I am not compelled by “notions of resistance” practiced by artists or art students.

SMP: Do you mean the notion that it is the artist’s responsibility to create interstices—new spaces of visibility that can serve as sites of resistance?

LJ: I would think demarcating “sites of resistance” would merely make them precious, or targets, or boutiques. Or worse, installations. No, we must do our best work in alliances with convivial constituencies, with cities, ecologies and systems, and without privileging artists and art practices. I would rather have bee-hives in the Eastern Market, than another art interstice.

SMP: You’ve spoken quite a bit about your role as an educator. I’m wondering how your praxis as an educator influences you as a maker, or are the two not exclusive?

LJ: I am influenced directly, intimately, thrillingly. No, not exclusive. Many of the most compelling contemporary creative makers and thinkers understand that 21stC engagement is one, inevitably, of hybrid practices and multi-site conversations, and collaborations. So to, I believe, should the academy be thus engaged. Alas, not so – we still have the discreet silo model, perpetuated by faculty and administrators. Clearly we must foster pedagogical templates that are not only founded on the demands of one’s craft, but also explores an intertwining of trends, debates, and practices in the humanities, sciences, politics, and worlds of commerce and communications. Our place in the world and how we can create meaningful relationships between others and ourselves is the challenge that faces us, and should motivate us to action and certainly to change. Most of this kind of creative labour is happening between students and communities, not between departments and colleges – so yes, this informs the kind of work I want to make directly and, of course, feeds back into my classrooms. The pedagogical imperative for me is to have students understand learning as the conversation that creates our cultures – in real-time, no deferment – participate now. Their lives, loves, and labor defines culture, and culture leads commerce. I wish to operate—and equip our students, citizenry, and colleagues to thrive—at the nexus between art, culture, commerce, and science. I want to support and encourage students to become authors of new subjects in the world: new subjects that celebrate the unique qualities of their relationships and aspirations within families, communities and global networks. An open-ended, porous, responsive and pleasure producing exploration – what an idea for an art school!

"Dual Site"

SMP: Site seems to be a reoccurring point of engagement in your work. Can you elaborate on your decision to relocate to Detroit and what you find compelling about this locality?

LJ: Your question has been much on my mind at the conclusion of my first year in this remarkable place – or dream, called Detroit. My current thinking? I’m not certain it has to be, any longer, a question of “leaving” in a definitive way, to go somewhere else – maybe it is closer in spirit to expanding, or re-forming. The world offers us an amazing set of options, and technologies, to engage nomadic ways of working and living. It feels simply like matter-expansion, and a very exciting one. My family and I will be triangulating between Maine, Detroit, and New York. The best way to understand this past year might be in my “articles of faith” - the pleasure of working with 45 incoming first-year students over the last three terms – amazing group of citizens – I have produced three complicated projects with a range of collaborators. And in October we open Signal-Return, a storefront press and print shop in the Eastern Market, to be directed by my partner, MeganO’Connell, produced with Team Detroit.

Detroit, past, present, and future, and the opportunity to participate in reinvention and innovation in a field I love. Regarding location, the potential of place has always been a compelling force for me. What can I make of the past, of material history? What is just beyond the visible? What is the space of potential between the claims of the past and the demands of the future? I have made the acts of reading, walking and sensing place, priorities – I was born in Cape Town, remember… complex, volatile, vivid. Detroit looms very large for me.

 Sarah Margolis-Pineo is a curator and writer. She is currently the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow at the Cranbrook Art Museum.

Related Posts

• Dispatcher of Narratives, Promulgator of Ideas: An Interview with Megan O’Connell of Signal-Return
• Matters of the Heart and Hand: An Interview with Chido Johnson, Part 1
• Detroit Hustles Harder: MakerSpace Roundup
• Learning from the Work: A Follow-Up Interview with Chido Johnson
• Make this Better: An Interview with Broken City Lab

Lao Zhu and the Flour Factory, 2009

Human infrastructure can only withstand so much benign neglect before returning to nature. Much like the children of bohemian parents or the subjects of laissez-faire governments, the physical structures of built space will eventually succumb to wildness if left too long on their own. In no city is this process more apparent than in Detroit, where creeping vines engulf Victorian homes, trees sprout from the roofs of skyscrapers, and packs of wild dogs roam the streets. Nature has been slowly reclaiming the city for decades, disseminating a sense of wildness that many proclaim is a promise of renewal rather than an admission of failure.

Surveying the expanse of Detroit prairie, it does indeed appear that the city has been given a proverbial green slate upon which to rebuild and flourish as a newly incarnated future city. The future has not arrived yet, however; so for the moment, many Detroiters are making do as only Detroiters know how—embracing the period of transition with resourcefulness, ingenuity, and a sense of possibility.

Detroit-based artist Scott Hocking has been a life-long observer of a city in flux. His work explores the physical and psychological thresholds between crumbling infrastructure and flourishing nature. Through tactics that are technically illegal and certifiably insane, Hocking traverses vacant sites in forgotten corners of the world that are on the verge of collapse. His practice involves site-specific installation and documentary photography, where industrial debris becomes the backdrop for monumental sculpture. Beyond being the Andy Goldsworthy of urban detritus, Hocking’s work arrests the ephemeral, and reminds us that decay is an equal cause for celebration within the journey we call progress.

Recently, I had a conversation with Scott amidst the well-categorized clutter of his Detroit studio.

Discussed: Kangaroos and giant lizards, the end of mystery, fucking with everything, scrappers, documenting survival, a four-story collapse, making lemonade out of lemons.

Sisyphus and the Voice of Space, 2010

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: The most immediately striking attribute of your work is your depiction of site. Your photos have this other-worldly quality, like we’re looking at bacteria blooming on a Petri dish rather than an actual place. Working internationally, you must see quite a bit, and I’m wondering how you select where to work. What is it about these sites that you find compelling?

Scott Hocking: It’s hard for me even to articulate what it is that threads through everything that I do. It’s easiest to say that I work site-specifically, that I really just try to get a sense of a space and get ideas from my surroundings and from its history. I work differently in different places, but I end up being drawn to places that end up being somewhat forgotten, or maybe there’s a sense of mystery, or of chaos, or of loss of control. I feel like when nature reclaims places there’s a feeling that humans have stopped controlling it and it’s gone back to this wild, organic way of moving and living. Often times, that can involve the decaying of the structures that we’ve built. I’m not particularly drawn to abandonment or decay by themselves, but I have an interest in these places that give me a sense of solace. In Detroit, going into an abandoned auto factory is my walk in the woods. It’s the closest I can get to the top of a mountain peak—the top of a building. This is where I get my sense of wildness—my satisfaction in nature. I did this project in Australia in October, and I was in the bush. I loved it, because that was it—I was getting it from my everyday life. I walked out of my space to see kangaroos in the morning, and I hiked into the mountain and ran into giant lizards. I don’t get that here, but I crave that wildness, and I think I get it from these spaces that have begun to be reclaimed by nature.

SMP: It interests me that you characterize your work as site-specific, because your images also express a certain universality, or an ambiguity in the way of place. Is this intentional?

SH: I think, for me, I may work from the site and get ideas from the history and the site itself, but in the end, what I want the images to convey is something more universal. I don’t want people to look at the image and think: Oh, this is Detroit. Sure, people might recognize it, or know it knowing that my work is based here. But, I do try and emphasize that this could be anywhere, and what is behind it speaks to people everywhere… It might sound grandiose or dramatic, but I’m trying to talk about people—about humans on earth, what we do, what we’ve always done, how we’re really no different than we’ve ever been. When I put a pyramid in an abandoned building, one of the many things that I’m thinking about is the fact that it’s a ruin within a ruin. One is ancient, and I’m building a new one, and what’s the difference? Why do we look at some ruins with reverence, and see others as failures? Why can’t we realize that we’ve been creating things since the dawn of time, making structures and objects with our hands, and at some point they decay, at some point the civilization that made it fails, at some point the city in which it was made disappears? It’s not the end—there’s never an ending. So maybe there’s a certain countering to the idea that this is the end of something, that this is a failed city, or a failed industrial age. I just see it as a constant cycle that we’re in the middle of. I just try to find the beauty in all the stages.

Ziggurat and FB21, 2007-2009

SMP: You seem to take an almost ethnographic approach to collecting data on decaying works of culture. Do you see yourself as an urban anthologist in a way?

SH: I was transient for years, and didn’t go to art school until I was about 22. When I first went to college, I had lots of interests including anthropology. I took a number of courses actually, and I found out very quickly that I am way too impatient for the scientific method. So, for me to claim that I’m an ethnographer, anthropologist, archaeologist, you name it, would be a slap in the face to those who have studied for all those years. I’m an amateur at best—I feel like I have the curiosity, without any of the knowledge. If I was to excavate anything, you’d find out what an amateur I am. I’m okay with wrenching something to death, just shaking it until it falls loose, or kicking it until it’s down… I have no problem fucking with everything, and I’m sure scientists would be a lot more finicky about disturbing the site.

Relics, an installation at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2001

SMP: It seems that the installation-aspect of your practice—the way that you build in the field to create sculptural works within these sites, speaks to processes of myth-making. Is myth something you consciously incorporate into your work?

SH: Yeah, for sure. I love mythology, and I’ve started to really become inspired by ancient ideas—mythologies and ancient sciences more than anything. I don’t pay attention to the current art scene—I don’t know what is hip right now. I just know that my ideas come from generations ago, and somehow I’m more inspired by that. Mythology is exists outside of time…

One thing that I appreciate about ancient ideas is that they were often more lyrical, and there was a sense of mystery. Today, we’ve destroyed all our mysteries! We’ve figured them all out and are looking at them with telescopes or microscopes, taking things apart. I feel like there isn’t enough mystery, whereas in ancient times and myth, there was a lot. If you even read it now, you don’t know what they’re talking about; so there’s a part of me that likes to try and create this sense of mystery or myth when I’m in these buildings. And it could be as simple as someone coming into a building and discovering the Ziggerat, or discovering the TVs on the columns in the Garden of the Gods. It could be as simple as me creating a sense of: who the hell did this? When did this happen? What the fuck is this?! For example, building the pyramid—it’s a universal symbol that has existed on all continents since we’ve first started building things, and we have no idea why. It’s still a mystery to this day. Some people might look at my work and think: wow, this is an amazing thing, while others might look at it and laugh. It might be a joke, and I love how it can be interpreted in so many different ways because it’s an archetypal symbol. I like playing around, to be honest. There’s a part of me that’s very serious, and there’s a part of me that likes having a sense of humor about things. I like being open minded and I like that art can be perceived differently by different people because of our different backgrounds, and god knows what. So I don’t like to narrow in too much. I like to maintain that nebulous quality.

Garden of the Gods, 2009-2010

SMP: Can you speak a bit more to your process? How do your projects, like Garden of the Gods, [which was installed and photographed in Detroit’s landmark Packard Plant], usually unfold?

SH: Garden of the Gods was fun because those pedestals were formed when the roof collapsed and those columns were still standing. Immediately I thought of pedestals. If you’ve ever been to Rome or any of the ancient cities, they have statues up on pedestals—gods or warriors to be revered. I thought there needs to be some gods up there, and as luck would have it, in another part of the building that was used for storage was filled with television sets. Hundreds. And this was almost too easy for me—the idea is almost too simplistic that the TVs are new gods, and I’m going to put them up on these pedestals. But I have to admit that it was just too good to resist. I’m sure other artists would have taken it a step further, but for me, I’m a simple guy, so I thought: these are our new gods, I’m going to put them up on the pedestals, and I’m going to name them after the twelve classical Greek Pantheon gods.

In the end, it was all for an image, but I love the idea that people will come across the actual objects. That interaction is a significant part of the way I’m working now. I alluded to it earlier when I said that I’m attracted to places where there’s a loss of control and a little wildness. Detroit is that kind of place. When I’m working on projects like this, there’s also a loss of control in terms of what I might do. I can’t come home to the studio every day and resume working on the same project. I’m going out to a building I don’t own that could be torn down, burned down, destroyed, renovated, boarded up, somebody could have broken in and knocked over or spray painted what I’m working on, they could have added to it, or the materials I’m using could suddenly be gone. There are so many variables I don’t have control over—a hell of a lot of chance involved. It’s sort of like working on a sculpture, and every night putting it outside to see if someone stole it in the morning. It’s a real freeing way of working… I just try and trust the universe.

Sisyphus and the Voice of Space, 2010

SMP: So I have to ask about the aestheticization of decay, since it’s a very prevalent topic of conversation in the city at the moment…

SH: It’s so interesting that no one was saying “ruin porn” ten years ago… I’ve been really exploring vacant spaces and forgotten places since I was a child. Maybe it’s in my nature, but when I grew up it was near the railroad tracks in a real blue collar neighborhood, so I was exploring these places as a little kid. So the notion of ruin porn, I understand where it’s coming from, but I also feel like the media is coming late to the party.

People have been interested in doing this stuff for a long time, and the city is only now becoming overloaded and flooded with people “urban exploring” and taking photographs… Through the 70s, 80s and 90s, so much was abandoned in Detroit—places like the train station, Packard, or Fisher Body—these really trademark, vacant buildings in Detroit all happened in the 80s! It’s amazing, these places looked like people just up and left work one day, and if you were the first guy to get in there, like a scrapper, you wouldn’t have even known the place was abandoned. Coffee would still be out. So, these buildings look a hell of a lot different today than when I began working on this. I have always enjoyed going in these places, and for years I didn’t take photos—I was just using the objects to make work. If I ever brought a camera it was to have an excuse if I got caught. And then very slowly, I started to take photos more because I began to want to document these places before they disappeared. A lot of these places became very cherished to me, and I began to see how fast they were disappearing. I never considered myself a photographer, and it was through the process of taking these initial photographs that I became sensitive to the idea that I was just, as someone put it to me recently, “documenting survival,” and that wasn’t enough for me. So this path was good in the sense that it made me transition into photographing these places as larger installation projects. So now they’re just sets—I don’t have to create the whole environment, I just need to find the environment I want to create in. Other photographers will create environments in a vacant studio, and for me, my projects allow me to collaborate with buildings and collaborate with sites that I find mesmerizing. I know I’ve found a place to work in when I want to take a photograph of it alone. If I get that feeling, I think: Okay, this is where I’m going to build something. This is where I want to interact.

Roosevelt Warehouse and the Cauldron, 2007-2010

SMP: You really seem to occupy these very uncertain, threshold spaces in the city. Is there a certain adrenaline rush that accompanies this type of work?

SH: That is such a great word—I love the word threshold. It’s such an important word for me, because I feel like Detroit is on a threshold. These buildings are on a threshold. These are places in a space between what they were, and what they are going to be—they’re in transition. We’re always in transition, but sometimes transitions can take 40-years, or other times transitions can be catastrophic and can happen overnight.

The Packard Building for example, I was working in there through the winter, and by March, I had people coming through to interview me for upcoming exhibitions, [watch a video of Scott giving a tour of the Packard here]. Two weeks later, there was a four-story collapse, right where we were standing! Two weeks later! It was an unbelievable amount of space that just fell, and we all would have been crushed. I’ve been in buildings and places where I’ve done dumb things—fallen through holes, hit my head, been attacked by dogs. There are a lot of risks you take, and I don’t really get that adrenaline rush anymore, but there’s something about the way it affects your senses—they become heightened and aware. Again, in the same way they would be if you were lost in the woods. If you were lost in the woods or at sea, and you’re not in control and you’re not sure if a shark is going to bite you or a bear is going to come at you, that way your senses sort of open up in these situations is the same.

I think that is certainly appealing—that sense of being alive. You notice every fleck of paint on the wall, every sound you hear. A pigeon flies out and you have to be aware that it’s a pigeon and not something about to hit you. Your senses become heightened and I think I’m very attracted to that too.

New Mound City, 2010

SMP: In a way, your work forges new pathways through forgotten places, exposing fissures in the traditional urban network. It brings to my mind the Situationist tactic of dérive—the practice of walking “off the grid” in search of an unmediated, authentic experience within the urban landscape. Would you describe your process as an act of resistance?

SH: Saying it’s an act of resistance might be a little much… I do feel, though, that the reason I can easily let go of these objects that I’m making and allow them to be destroyed is because the process is more important to me than the object. So really, these experiences that I’m trying to seek out, I don’t think I could find them without going “off the grid,” so to speak. Off the grid is where I have these experiences in my version of nature and can seek purity and solace, as I mentioned earlier. And it’s not only a walk in the woods for me, but it’s kind of like my church too. It can be a metaphysical thing—I basically meditate when I’m working in these buildings alone, like a monk stacking blocks in quiet, in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of winter. It’s a real peaceful, meditative experience to work like this, and often times, I have to break the rules and break the law to find this, but I’m certainly not going in there and saying: fuck you! I’m a bit more quiet about it.

It’s about inner peace and peace of mind than it is about the big FU to the powers that be. Now, on the other hand, if the powers that be were cool about things like this, then I wouldn’t have to break the law.  I do feel like in a sense: fuck you, because you’ve left these buildings to neglect, you own this space and it’s falling apart. If you own this, I’m not going to call you up and ask you for permission, because I’m already pissed that you let it fall apart. I feel like you lose the right to say you own something when you’ve let something so useful and amazing go to waste.

Sisyphus and the Voice of Space, 2010

SMP: We’ve already spoken about the influence of myth, and I’m wondering if memory comes into play at all when you’re at work in these spaces?

SH: I feel like it’s not my memory most of the time. There are many people who grew up in Detroit or one of the other cities that I’ve worked in, who might feel nostalgia for the past, and have certain memories of buildings—maybe even have family members who have worked there. There are all kinds of connections. In fact, when an article comes out, I’ve gotten emails from people who say: Hey, I used to work there! What’s been surprising is that all of these people have written to tell me that they like what I am doing. My own sense of memory… I don’t really connect in that way to these spaces.

I don’t really like the idea of nostalgia, I prefer to focus on the present moment and find the beauty in how things are now opposed to looking back on how they were. I tend to work in buildings that aren’t very personal—they’re places of work—factories. There may have been thousands of people working and occupying the spaces where I am working at any given moment. These sites don’t quite have that trace, or energy, that a house might—where people lived and slept, family members loved and grew up. I don’t really work in places like that, and I think part of the reason is because of the memory—the idea of who they were is still very strong there, and you can feel it and see it sometimes. I think I shy away from that a bit.

Tartarus, an installation at Public Pool Gallery, 2011

SMP: There’s such a fantastic history in Detroit, perhaps initiated in the 70s by the Cass Corridor Movement, with artists appropriating materials that are symbolic of crisis—the raw, discarded material of a city, to create artwork.  I read this great quote the other day that was something along the lines of: we didn’t have much, but we made art with it. Is this idea something that persists today in the city?

SH: I think it’s continued. Personally, I have no history with Cass Corridor—I didn’t grow up knowing about it, and I didn’t know anyone involved until I started making art and meeting people who were part of that. Now we’re good friends, and it’s maybe through meeting people and gaining a bit of knowledge that you start to realize that it’s all connected. For me, it’s less about the linage of the art world in Detroit, and more about Detroiters and the way we are. Most people who grow up in working class families and in working class neighborhoods in the city, this is how we work—we do with what you have, make lemonade out of lemons. Everybody, myself included, who has been making artwork in the city hasn’t had resources to do anything but making with what you have. Sometimes you’re living in squalor and trying to scrape by… The Cass Corridor people got a lot of notoriety, but shit, there were artists in the 80s living inside the Broderick Tower and Fort Wayne, and had studios in random skyscrapers that were virtually vacant because no one could afford to do anything in there. These artists may have not gotten the same attention, but that lineage is all the same—trying to use the spaces that have been neglected because creative people see potential there.

Congratulations to Scott for his award of a 2011 Kresge Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship!

Sarah Margolis-Pineo is a curator and writer. She is currently the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow at the Cranbrook Art Museum.

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