Can Art Save a City?

Can Detroit be saved? With pledges of major funding now in place, one can hold out hope for the Detroit Institute of Arts. And now that court rulings have cleared the way, one can imagine a sounder financial footing for the city as well. Still, Detroit intends to deal with decades of abandonment not by reviving old retail and housing stock, but by leveling them. Apparently, this is one exercise in urban planning that does not count on artists and hipsters to inhabit the margins. But can a city save entire communities by destroying them?

Maybe, or maybe it will have to settle for watching them go. One might say the same, too, about the city’s art. “Another Look at Detroit” features more than fifty “artists, designers, and cultural contributors” through August 8. Together with my wrap-ups from last time and a bit earlier on summer group shows, it is also the subject of a longer review, as my latest upload.

The exhibition spans two Chelsea galleries, Marlborough and Marianne Boesky—with a portrait of Boesky’s grandfather, in a family better known for a chain of delis, some topless bars, and Ivan Boesky, the center of a Wall Street trading scandal. It has contemporary artists as familiar as Mike Kelley, Scott Reeder, James Lee Byars, Julie Mehretu, Dana Schutz, Cyprien Gaillard, Tony Matelli, Jim Shaw, Nick Cave, and Jennifer Jason Reeves, who died of cancer only days before the opening. The funny thing is how little one associates them with Detroit and how quickly they left it behind.

Kelley all but exemplifies LA art and Reeder the Lower East Side. Byars discovered himself in Kyoto and died in Cairo. Mehretu, born in Ethiopia, also has something of a global identity. Diego Rivera worked in Detroit, but on a portrait of the eponym for failure, Edsel Ford. The Cranbrook Academy can count the Eames brothers and Eero Saarinen among its alumni, but their furniture here looks a little ratty. So for that matter does the show’s layout.

The curator, Todd Levin, speaks of “a sprawling tone poem evoking the city where I was born and raised,” but he has no illusions about its present or future. Each gallery opens with a pile of Ray Johnson’s slim Detroit Artist Monthly, a limited sign of life from an artist who died in 1995. Then comes a dark room with only three works—two markers of a contentious history in one corner and a portrait of present-day decay in another. They include Bill Rauhuaser’s photo of a multiracial city in the 1960s and Scott Hocking’s New Book of Knowledge from 2010, but the first is barely composed and the other in tatters.

Finally, one passes through a second black curtain and into a cluttered installation with little in the way of narrative, chronology, or organization. You decide what survives from the ruins, it seems to say, and you determine the future.

Levin insists that he is out neither to document “a place of perpetual flames” nor to paper over it. He is after neither a comprehensive history nor the particulars of today. One sees little of its museum, beyond a stiff group portrait of its first board of trustees. One sees an early modern Detroit, in a painting touched by expressionism and the Aschcan school, but nothing of Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and prewar tributes to Ford’s Rouge River Plant. One sees techno recordings from Metroplex records, but not the classic Detroit sound. One sees old Ford ads and a parody of them by Liz Cohen, with a woman seductively straddling an automobile hood, but not enough of the city that the industry produced and left behind.

The obvious question is what that leaves beyond missed opportunities. One can sense a shared intricacy bursting the picture plane, especially in the present. One can look for its roots in a Crankbrook degree—or the energy of a city. And one can see the importance of African Americans to that energy, as far back as Robert S. Duncanson, a descendant of freed slaves in the Hudson River School.

So can Detroit be saved by its diversity, and can art count among its saviors? Maybe, the exhibition seems to confess, but they may not stay for long.

SOURCE: Haberarts – Read entire story here.