Enrico Natali, Detroit 1968

Why do I find the images in Enrico Natali: Detroit 1968 to be uncanny?

The recent bankruptcy filing by the city of Detroit may act as a marker for legal and financial definitions of decline or catastrophe, but does it tell us much beyond civic bureaucracy? In media, Detroit in recent years, has become as exotic a place as Berlin, where one can still find traces of World War II, or Havana, closed off from the splendors of the West by dint of its revolution, whereas Detroit is the ruin of industry, of capitalism, on a grand scale. Camilo Jose Vergara's "immodest proposal" to cordon off downtown Detroit as an Acropolis of Industry dates from 1995. "Crisis" was how industry ran, no stranger to generations of the city; but if one were to sense a sea-change, it would be that in the past, a crisis would necessitate change of some sort which would be considered to lead to some sort of resolution, however provisional that may be; whereas now, where do we go? The solutions of the past were in relation to industry, but now there is no industry, just people and a place. The cynical machinations of the Kwame Kilpatrick administration, illuminated through Kilpatrick's various trials and serial imprisonments could be seen as the the fulfillment of entrepreneurial stewardship: he was just doing what you would do in that situation, getting what he could get. Or, as Kilpatrick wrote in one of the numerous texts to his mistress, as reported in the Detroit Free Press: you're only busted if they see you. A state-appointed supervisor, working above the city's government, illustrates another endgame of bureaucracy: make more bureaucracy. Along with the continual crisis of the the economy, the stopgap measures of a failing government lay out a weird cycle of damnation and futility pulling the puppet strings of the the terrible world of Capitalism, in which God's grace is measured in financial terms.

The Fordist principles that transformed Detroit from a small-ish manufacturing center in the late nineteenth century to a hub of automobile manufacturing and the "arsenal of democracy" during World War II were structured around the idea of production, of a potential unlimited production. It also meant folding the workers into production and consumption, making the workers synonymous with their work. Looking at the policies of the Sociological Department and English School at Ford we can see a thorough process of institutionalized assimilation at work. From the Ford archives:

The culmination of the Ford English School program was the graduation ceremony where students were transformed into Americans. During the ceremony speakers gave rousing patriotic speeches and factory bands played marches and patriotic songs. The highlight of the event would be the transformation of immigrants into Americans. Students dressed in costumes reminiscent of their native homes stepped into a massive stage-prop cauldron that had a banner across the front identifying it as the AMERICAN MELTING POT. Seconds later, after a quick change out of sight of the audience, students emerged wearing “American” suits and hats, waving American flags, having undergone a spiritual smelting process where the impurities of foreignness were burnt off as slag to be tossed away leaving a new 100% American.

Assimilation also means erasure and forgetting. A place like Detroit, expanding outwards into the flat fields outside the city, allowed people to emerge in a New World made of industry, shopping, and a family home. The centrifugal patterns of development would emerge later as a more disastrous pattern than anticipated when the core of the city,from  which all radiated out long avenues, became hollowed out by abandonment.

The Sociological Department appears in Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex, which includes a very precise geography of Detroit and an account of the processes of assimilation for immigrants. The Sociological Department  functioned as a panopticon for Ford: keeping track of the workers, making sure they were of proper character for the work place.

Which take me back to Enrico Natali's photographs, which are from the late 1960s. The decline of the Big 3 was already in place, or at least the decline was local: the Big 3 were moving factories to North Ireland and South Africa. The 1967 riot had been very destructive and polarizing between city and suburbs, but Detroit was still a very wealthy city.

We can see a little of that in Natali's photographs. It's a shock for me now to see the downtown streets crowded, that there had been a sense of it as a place in which to circulate, to shop or see a movie (sorry to miss Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! on the big screen).. The predominantly white population downtown are in movement: downtown reads as an excursion. & so many f the people in groups look like they are in uniforms, too, of some sort. Natali's street images could be read in contrast with Garry Winogrand's - Winogrand's images are composed in a more gothic, anamorphic way - we become aware of the camera and its use more than any subject. Whereas Natali works with methods related to the documentary projects of the 1930s: there's less intervention in framing, the images have a contemplative aspect to contrast with what were busy, circulating streets. In the prints I've seen there's an immaculate technique in terms of exposure & printing, and an operative kindness towards the people in the photos. Another aspect of the images that could be explored is how gendered the groups are - men with men, women with women, along with any racial divides that could be seen, too.

The feyness of the two boys in front of the movie theater makes me wonder: in contemporary terms the image reads as queer, but historically, would queerness have existed like that? Or are these proto-metrosexuals? The boys exude a sense of privilege, which may be the privilege of just being very young with the blitheness that they occupy the place. An industrial city like Detroit was not a tolerant space for queerness in public.

Earlier this year on line I found another Detroit photographer, Bruce Harkness, with work from the 1970s. Harkness worked in the Cass Corridor, the slum just north of downtown, with some images from a transvestite bar The Gold Dollar Show Bar and another local place, Verdi's Bar, which shared clientele. Harkness's photos remind me of Anders Petersen's Cafe Lehmitz somewhat, with a Weegee flash and that old industrial Midwestern sense of grimness-in-daily-life. But my point in this is: the sense of exclusion and concealment, the afterhours as refuge at the Gold Dollar or Verdi's were the reality of local queerness in Detroit. Harkness was totally off the map for me prior to finding his website.

There are other Detroit photographers, such as Bill Rauhauser and Brad Iverson who have significant bodies of work done in Detroit. Nancy Barr has curated exhibitions of photographs of Detroit at the Institute of Arts: Detroit Revealed, Motor City Muse, and Robert Frank - Detroit Experiences 1955 which are significant expansions of its visual history. Another contemporary photographer who works with images of Detroit past & present is Dave Jordano. The artists in Detroit are perhaps its best reporters - they still work outside a globalized post-Fordist economy, there's still a locatable sense of agency to practice, they're outside the absurdist theater of local politics or the viciousness of industry. Who to consult in this invidious world?

The Natali image of the two boys exudes a pungent sense of outrageous arrogant privilege in a stroll down Woodward Ave: next stop, Ibiza!  I see so many of the contradictions of daily life in Detroit. The boys return me to Middlesex, to the "Obscure Object" for Cal/Callie when in high school in Grosse Pointe, to the adolescent abyss of seeing someone attractive, outside of oneself, and cruelly self-contained and unattainable. In the emotional aftermath of that realization one could echo on a personal level, the city of Detroit motto, penned by Father Gabriel Richard, the founder of the University of Michigan, in 1805 following a fire which destroyed the entire settlement: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cieribus - We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes.

Detroit Experiences, Robert Frank Photographs, 1955

Following the remarkable exhibition & book from the National Gallery in DC, Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, the Detroit Institute of Arts has a remarkable portfolio of Frank's images made in Detroit while on his Guggenheim fellowship, in 1955, which will offer even more insight into Frank's processes, as well as offering a rich (which in this context - excuse the pun) treatment of the city of Detroit as a subject matter. There are both well-known images as well as much more obscure & unpublished images in the group. It will be on view at the end of March.

Images made in Detroit constitute a good 10% of The Americans, & while images made at the Ford Rouge plant may be easily identifiable, there are such iconic images in Frank's work such as of a couple at a rodeo, or the Gratiot Drive-In, which offer a much more complex vision of the post-WWII metropolis. That Frank, a Swiss emigre, in New York, would locate Detroit as a site remarkable for its industry as well as its strip-mall modernity, its decentralization, indicates intuition & critical facility. Frank was friends with the writer Jack Kerouac, who had spent a short time in Detroit, earlier, & who by all accounts had experienced both highs & lows as a result. Perhaps Frank, as a result of his companionship, avoided any unnecessary highs (the Grosse Pointes, "polite" society). The Detroit in Frank's images is a working class world which hovers between the urban & the rural. I can't really term it suburban as what is in the images is not really about that. Suburbia implies progress, change. It's more about a kind of raw land given shape by mass production & cheapness, identity as a kind of blanket statement of commodities.

Growing up in the metro Detroit area in the 1960s & 1970s I have early memories of driving from Royal Oak to Northland, in Southfield, driving on rigorously straight roads (12 Mile, Greenfield, Southfield) through open land, & subsequently such flat tree-less prairie being filled with developments, to the point of un-recognition. As a child of New Deal Democrats I remember a bit of mirth at a street in Southfield momentarily named "Spiro Agnew Drive."

The downtown, which constituted for me most of the city, from the New Center down Woodward Ave. to the river, was an alternative universe of great urbanity.

The Frank images at the DIA constitute both well-known images such as the the Rouge assembly line & the Gratiot Drive-In, as well as images that were part of the series, but never finished, per se. This is a great opportunity to see Frank images in a much earthier manner than the museological pursuits of the NGA. While the depth of the Looking In project, as both publication & exhibition, is remarkable, I think that there's a kind of disjuncture in looking at the truly remarkable final prints, which were produced - finer than the reproductions in The Americans, finer than one would think, of the images. Such prints seem after the fact, as an image , a kind of commodification.

Frank's images of Detroit also engage the social world, unlike the almost contemporaneous work of Harry Callahan, made in Detroit before Callahan's move to Chicago. Frank is always at the tawdrier ends of things. Callahan photographed both weeds & parked cars as formal elements, whereas Frank showed the assembly line as dreary monotony & the nearby pleasures - fast foods at a soda counter, the drive-in movie - as rather disappointing palliatives.

Frank's images of Detroit in The Americans are among the most pungent in the book. For those used to a sense of history & culture in their sense of place, this may seem a bit foreign, but I would say that post-WWII Detroit was an urban sprawl on the edge of nothingness, of flat boring nothing. The hoopla around commodities & a safe sense of a good life could cloak the fence-post between cozy & void. But that's it. The twilight as seen in Frank's Gratiot Drive-In image is the sense of the planet turning, indifferent to the cars & drivers in the shadows below.

Larry Sultan 1946-2009

Larry Sultan's work is most familiar to me from books: Evidence, Pictures from Home, and The Valley. The work also exists as gallery prints & has been used in magazines spreads. My personal attachment is to the books & the experience such a form offers: private, on my own time.

Evidence, made with Mike Mandel, is a collection of industrial photographs, which as a collection, leads to a kind of non-sense of imagery. Nothing relates, nothing really means anything, but the viewer is face-to-face with "evidence" of something somehow. There is a dry humor in the residue of corporate imagery, it's utter obscurity & obsolescence, but it is also a kind of psychic downward spiral, a tension between the kitsch of execution & a horror of banality.

Unlike a lot of work which uses vernacular imagery often as a kind of nostalgia, or a collection used to codify forms, Evidence uses imagery which traffics between the institutional & the ridiculous - as archaeology, the imagery is ultimately embarrassing in its weirdness, its cryptic passages between intention & effect.

There is an agitational quality to Sultan's work, an unrest, a meta-critique of the uses of photography which is most apparent in Evidence, in which the imagery is found, but which also informs the 2 long-term projects, Pictures from Home, which deals with the suburban culture of Sultan's parents, and The Valley, which is "behind the scenes" of the adult film industry.

Pictures from Home uses both Sultan's color photographs of his parents, living on the edge of a golf course, in southern CA, along with frame enlargements of home movies made by Sultan's father. The home movies are predictably bucolic & idealized - vacations, fun, high points. Sultan's photographs seem much darker in comparison, although in extremely lush color, in the brilliant SoCal light, in their acute focus & detail (contra the pictorial inexactitude of the home movies). Sultan's parents are used as kind of a test-case of post WWII prosperity & its retirement, figures placed in an artificial new world of synthetics, hovering in an ahistorical constant present. Sultan's parents become the post WWII nuclear family, severed from kith & kin, adrift in a sea of commodities.

In comparison, the images in The Valley seem the most illustrative, juxtaposed with both Evidence & Pictures from Home. The images can be read easily in either magazine or on a gallery wall: the behind-the-scenes of the adult film industry, on location in rented McMansions in the San Fernando Valley. The images concentrate on the absolute clutter of the houses as sites of filmmaking, in terms of the logistics of the set-ups as well as everything that is necessary to sustain the shoot. Also the images deal with the hours of waiting behind any film project - hours of tedium distinguishing the work involved. While it has some of the romantic appeal of a film like Boogie Nights& a general fascination with the adult film industry in our culture (a Puritanical vision of carnality at its most commodified, i.e. sensible form), the real subject seems to be the conformity & dullness of work, any work. The hideous McMansions of the Valley photograph extremely well: settings of baroque vulgarity, impersonal except for the particularities of bad taste from house to house, & even then nothing is ever unique or outstanding. Everything is prefabricated, mass produced, & strangely empty. The models for the films reiterate the alienation of the architecture & decor in their utter displacement from it. Everything looks kind of awful & inexplicably expensive.

Larry Sultan's photographs for The Valley, printed large, fit comfortably in art galleries, wherein large color photographs are a kind of contemporary salon painting. Akin to PL DiCorcia's images of pole dancers, or the more obscure images of porn sets done by Jeff Burton, which seem more about distraction & daydreaming on the job (Burton was also working for various companies). Still, Sultan's images have a kind of distancing & self-consciousness which keeps them from being pure commodity. The images are rehearsals for images, attempts, auditions, lapses, distractions. The models look mechanical & bored. The theme of scientific management seen in the images of Evidence is sublimated but constant throughout The Valley.

From Evidence to The Valley: dealing w/ corporate imagery, the family, suburbia & sex. Such an engaged & challenging use of the camera & the photograph.

Dan Graham

I have been to the Dan Graham show now a few times. It isn't a large show per se & as I understand it, he is extremely prolific, but still the work has a peculiar density to it: the film & video work in particular are time-based, as are ostensibly some of the installations of the mirror chambers. But it's not just that: compared to other recent shows of conceptual artists shown at the Whitney, Robert Smithson & Gordon Matta-Clark, the Dan Graham show is remarkably immaterial, it's about questioning situations, space, roles, authority - it is emphatically not about the object but about a physical, social & psychological dynamic.

How curious to think of Dan Graham as immaterial as 1/2 of the show is of his mirror chambers, which are part carnival mirror-labyrinth, part horrifying mall architecture. Both seductive & repellently dystopic. In all their physicality, they are nevertheless about claustrophobia, entrapment, a paranoid sense of totalitarian control - issues not necessarily evident in the glass, wood & steel, per se. There's a sense of humor in the displacement of the senses, the distortion of perceptions, but also there's a deadly serious sense of interrogation, of isolation, of torture to it all, too.

The work by Dan Graham I am most familiar with is the magazine piece Homes for America which was originally published in
Arts Magazine. The layout is on display along with a slideshow of the images & some boards on which images are mounted - a kind of educational presentation. The images, shot in Staten Island & New Jersey, are mock-serious in setting up distinctly formal arrangements of housing developments, which are of a distinctly lowbrow nature. The symmetry or assymetry of doorways & windows. The geometry of cheap materials. The abject non-spaces of fast-food places. In a retrospective manner the images are quite beautiful - but of a chintzy, Las Vegas, cardboard & tinsel kind of sophistication - something promising more than the shit at hand. The images are mounted on boards which are now curling w/ age & humidity.

The cheapness & lack of grandiosity are perhaps what I find most compelling about the work. There is so much to think about in looking at this work.

Las Vegas Studio - Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brownis a catalog for an exhibit at the Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, edited by Hilar Stadler & Martino Stierli, in collaboration with Peter Fischli. The book includes an essay by Stierli, a conversation "Flaneurs in Automobiles" with Peter Fischli, Rem Koolhaas, & Hans Ulrich Obrist, & an essay, "Tableaux," by Stanislaus von Moos. The images are from the archives of the architectural firm of Venturi & Scott Brown, & were made as part of a class they taught at Yale in 1968 in which the sprawl of Las Vegas was studied, resulting in the book Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. The class included prints, slides and films of Las Vegas collected as part of the research, some of which were used as illustrations in the book. The first edition was physically large and included more images, whereas the more commonly known second edition included images which are in miniature on the page, in a sense de-emphasized, but still crucial in the book's role as a kind of manifesto of the strip, of sprawl, of vernacular car culture as a site of learning.

As an amateur in the field of architecture I will refrain from saying much about Venturi & Scott Brown's ideas, but I will say I have always been struck by the images in the 2nd edition, regardless of their miniaturization, & that the catalog of their image archive is a delirious collection of what is now a long-lost world of unconscious automobile excursions (cheap gas, the charm of the highway strip) & "old" Vegas, before it became a place of Disney-scale family entertainment.

The photographs are emphatically not "fine" - they have none of the spectacular aspects of then-contemporary commercial architectural photography (Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, Balthasar Korab) & instead are executed in a laconic, amateurish, mechanical manner. It is easy to see parallels between the Venturi & Scott Brown images & the self-produced artists books of Ed Ruscha (Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Twentysix Gasoline Stations), in scale & lack of visual inflection: & it is noted in the catalog that Venturi & Scott Brown visited the studio of Ruscha in Los Angeles & were well aware of his photographic work, as they began their work! Given the heroic scale of most architectural photography, one can see the images, which as much as they rely on chance, on the aesthetics of the amateur snapshot, as being quite deliberate & intentional. In tandem with the text of Learning from Las Vegas, this reifies a looking at the most common vernacular forms as a place of study. To quote Denise Scott Brown: What environment lies about us, and how is this different from what the media of a dominant culture suggest should be there?