Detroit Chronicle

THE NEW CRITERION

October 2016

On the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit & the role of art in the history of the city.

Detroit is a city of art. Strange to say, but it’s true. While much has left this impoverished, often heartbreaking metropolis, what remains, surprisingly, is a rich art history, which is today right on the surface. With origins that run deep and predate the automobile, Detroit’s artistic roots flower over the city streets left empty by the cars that have, by and large, driven away. And they deserve attention, which is why I visited with the family on a late-summer road-trip, ten hours from New York, twelve by way of Niagara Falls—a rewarding and remarkable artistic pilgrimage.

It was a close call for Detroit to reach its current and still parlous state of the arts. Most of us had little idea of the Motor City’s artistic legacy until it was almost too late. After decades of decline, the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009 hastened Detroit’s own insolvency, which in 2013 led to the largest municipal collapse in American history. Detroit was $18–20 billion in debt. As an emergency manager looked to liquidate assets, creditors made headlines as they closed in on the city’s remaining jewel: the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the country’s great encyclopedic museums.

The faith that those museum administrators once placed in the future of their city says much about the wild extremes Detroit has experienced over the last century. From a population of nearly 2 million in 1950, when it was arguably the richest city per capita in the country and the Silicon Valley of the Machine Age, today Detroit retains under 700,000 residents, experiencing a 25 percent decline in just the last decade as entire neighborhoods have been abandoned as ghost towns. A history of violence, Jim Crow, corruption, race riots, white flight, failed redevelopment, and monorails-to-nowhere has long accompanied these seismic shifts. Today much of the city seems more passively desolate than actively menacing, with weedy, empty streets and an abundance of graffiti-scarred architecture, some remaining from its Gilded Age. But such images of what have become known as Detroit’s “ruin porn” only tell one side of the story. The arts give a broader picture of the full, continuing life of the city, and they may play an increasing role in its future.

This is not to say that the arts will “save Detroit,” as some have suggested. The sociologist Richard Florida, who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class in 2001, has staked much on this messianic and largely unproven claim for rustbelt renewal. Instead, cities work best when the planners get out of the way of artists rather than attempting to use them as tools of gentrification. Basing your urban future on jet-setting bohemians coming to town for a Matthew Barney film shoot is no way to keep the lights on and the water running, or, more to the point, strengthen the local cultural fabric. In his scabrous 2012 book, Detroit City Is the Place to Be, Mark Binelli was onto something when he wrote that “any potential Detroit arts renaissance remains in its earliest phase of development, more about insane real estate opportunities and the romantic vision of a crumbling heartland Berlin—basically, vicarious wish fulfillment by coastal arts types living in long-gentrified cities—than an overarching homegrown aesthetic.” Various reports of the founders of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn arts space Galapagos relocating to Detroit to develop (or flip) unused factory space have only fueled such creative-class speculation.

But Detroit did end up saving the art, starting with grassroots initiatives like the Heidelberg Project, founded in 1986 by the artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather as a surreal outdoor installation over reclaimed buildings in the city’s McDougall-Hunt neighborhood. The rescuing of DIA was a similar story of renewal that starts with the art itself. In 2014 Detroit’s latter-day Monuments Men won a decisive battle for cultural reconstruction by fighting to reach what was called a “grand bargain” to save the museum. With a collection valued at $8.4 billion, and 2,800 objects worth between $454 and $867 million claimed by the city—including a self-portrait by Van Gogh estimated at $150 million—DIA successfully scrambled to raise hundred of millions of dollars from a combination of private, state, and corporate donors to pay off the creditors. In return, the art stayed on the walls, the museum returned to its pre-1919 status as a private, non-profit institution, and the people of the state demonstrated the value they place in Detroit’s art history.

The Great Hall of the Detroit Institute of Arts

DIA is today in better shape than its Detroit surroundings, which isn’t saying much, but those expecting to find a museum that is partially finished (like the Brooklyn Museum) or partially closed (like today’s Met) will be surprised at its institutional polish. DIA’s rise out of Detroit’s ashes has stoked its institutional enthusiasm as one of the best half-dozen museums in the country. A visit here alone is worth the trip.

Starting in the 1920s, DIA’s museum director Wilhelm Valentiner, following the German model, was the first to arrange his collection by nation and chronology, rather than type. He also greatly increaseddia’s collection of modern art and was responsible for its single most well-known, and controversial, installation: Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry.

Personally, politically, dietetically, Rivera was a repellent individual, but you can see why capitalists from Rockefeller to Ford became enamored of the unrepentant Marxist. Painted over twenty-seven panels, floor to ceiling, from 1932 to 1933 in the museum’s light-filled central court, Detroit Industry captures the one-time dynamism of the city in a swirling, hallucinatory tableau. This “iconized Marxist fantasia of working-class solidarity and collective toil,” as Binelli describes it, unites the workers of the north, the farmers of the south, and the raw materials of the Americas in one interconnected utopian vision. The didacticism of the spectacle is saved by its strangeness, as Rivera worked in imagery of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, Frida Kahlo’s miscarriage, and the kidnapped Lindbergh baby—pagan currents flowing in the chthonic depths beneath Detroit’s River Rouge. (The dense iconography is today supplemented by an excellent multimedia guide on DIA’s website, which is also available on touch screens in the gallery.)

A sense for the subterranean runs throughout the artists of Detroit, especially those responding to its decades of decline. The late artist Mike Kelley, who was born in 1954 in a working-class suburb of Detroit, was a patron saint of the post-apocalyptic city even after he relocated west, exhuming the afterbirth of its marriage of man and machine. Much of this was on display in Kelley’s arresting PS1 retrospective in 2014. A member of the alt-rock band Destroy All Monsters, Kelley connected Detroit art and music, a scene which gave rise not only to Motown Records but also to the punk aesthetic ofMC5 and The Stooges, and later techno—music, in various ways, all connected with the internal combustion engine and the sounds of the assembly line. In 2014, an exhibition called “Another Look at Detroit (Parts 1 and 2)” at New York’s Marianne Boesky and Marlborough Chelsea, arguably the best gallery shows of the year, made explicit these cultural connections by gathering some hundred objects by seventy artists from over two centuries of Detroit cultural history. This magisterial “tone poem” was the work of the art consultant and Detroit native Todd Levin—whom I must also thank for suggesting I try the world’s best pancakes at a Detroit motel diner called Clique.

Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead, 2012, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Just down Woodward Avenue from DIA is the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Mainly a Kunsthalle for contemporary shows, the museum’s big surprise can be found behind the parking lot. What looks like a modest prefab ranch house oddly positioned on an urban block is Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead. An uncanny reconstruction of his childhood home, the building now hosts rotating installations and a street-legal, detachable entryway that has already gone cross country. According to Kelley’s posthumous wishes (he committed suicide in 2012), the house is built with two private subterranean levels: a windowless duplicate floorplan beneath the ground level and, below that, a series of tunnels and ladders to connect the doorless rooms. A post-war dream atop a post-apocalyptic nightmare, the building serves as a chilling artist memorial.

A Detroit-area cultural institution very much in contrast with all this is Cranbrook, a school and cultural complex nestled in the sylvan and still- wealthy suburb of Bloomfield Hills. Founded in the 1920s, this institution may be best known today as the prep school where Mitt Romney bullied his classmates. But the Cranbrook Academy of Art also represents the prewar ideals of Detroit design given fascinating form in a pristine Arts and Crafts and Art Deco campus created by Eliel Saarinen. The Eameses both came from here, and Eliel’s son Eero went on to adapt the styles of Cranbrook for the jet age.

My trip to the Cranbrook Art Museum largely left me wanting more, as the campus’s extensive permanent collection is now sequestered in a new “Collections Wing” that is only open for one hour a week while the museum is given over to special and not-so-special exhibitions. Through October 9, the museum’s new director has imported his exhibition from the Walker Art Museum on “Hippie Modernism,” which makes a few interesting connections between Sixties utopianism and the dawn of the Information Age but mostly smells of patchouli and BO. It also has nothing to do with the school. Fortunately my visit was redeemed by a smaller, more technical exhibition downstairs on Pewabic Pottery, the ceramics studio and school founded in Detroit in 1903. I also took a detailed tour of the impeccable Saarinen House and Garden. As a total work of art, Cranbrook serves to remind us that Detroit, at its height, was a city of design that made flying sculptures and not just modes of auto-mobility.

Wasserman Projects

Back in Detroit, the contemporary gallery scene is small but sophisticated and growing, with several venues that have recently moved to the city. Wasserman Projects is a Chelsea-style space a block from the city’s extensive Eastern Market that over the summer was showing a group exhibition, including a whimsically enlarged notepad doodle by Michael Scoggins and a delicate collage of “oil, latex, gold leaf, string, soap, pencil” by Ed Fraga. Downtown, David Klein Gallery casts a wide and intelligent eye over the alternative scene by bringing together painters such as Brooke Moyse, Gary Peterson, and Mark Sengbusch. Over the summer, Galerie Camille, another smart venue just north in Midtown, brought together the artists Jeff Bourgeau and Matt Eaton in an elegant exhibition of Colorfield painting with a twist. As much an exhibition of process as of product, Eaton’s layered compositions of acrylic and spray paint contrasted with Bourgeau’s pixelated computer printouts of painterly forms.

Baby Grand gallery

My last stop proved to be a highlight: the opening of “It Runs Deep” at a gallery called Baby Grand in a burned-over corner of the city’s Southwest. This group show of Detroit-area artists, including Amber Locke, Alivia Zivich, Audra Wolowiec, Daniel Sperry, Kylie Lockewood, Margo Wolowiec, Nikolas Pence, Romain Blanquart, and Scott Reeder, was perfectly installed in the front rooms of an Arts and Crafts home that the owner of the gallery has named for its piano and illuminated only with naturallight. The sensitivity of the works, from Wolowiec’s sound installation to Reeder’s abstraction, speaks to the personal, the underground, and the hidden spirit of the arts in Detroit—which now, after a thaw, is beginning to grow into the light of day.

Letter to the Editor: Stuart Davis

I am more than grateful for these thoughts from Vered Lieb about my essay on Stuart Davis. Upon her request I am posting them here as a letter to the editor:

I did not want to let your last essay go by without letting you know how right I believe you are about the many facets you touch upon while reviewing the Stuart Davis show at the Whitney—including the catering to current art market dizziness by curators, rather then the true dictates of good art history.

I do very much like how you have evolved in your writing and therefore your understanding of art history and the fact that you evince the capacity to write about painting as if you painted as well.

That is the highest marks I can give an art critic, that they have become capable of entering the process and experiencing art from a physical standpoint as well as a mental approach.

Stuart Davis was one of my early childhood heroes.  My parents had a few books around the house about him (along with many others) and I just gravitated to his work. I also adored Michelangelo, de Kooning and Mondrian, from the same library in my parents home.  So that’s pretty eclectic for a little kid.But I always thought of Davis as an abstract artist.  Now my mother’s close friends, Ben Shahn and the Soyer brothers, their work I knew was not abstract.

When I grew up I always responded with a smile to any Stuart Davis I saw.  I still do.  It cannot be that Mr. Davis never experienced any sadness or suffering in his life because we all are too aware that the human condition is the same for all. And there is an interesting contrast with Edward Hopper who was painting at pretty much the same time. Rather I think that Davis must have made a decision to paint, as de Kooning once said about the place from where his art stems, from “joy.”

I applaud you for not seeing him as the father of Pop art, but rather (as I see him)  within the continuum ofa very American Abstract Expressionist movement. He really knew how to put that paint down on a canvas and though his strokes are not de Koonings or Pollocks, they are strokes and a way of application that is his.  His sense of cubistic space was spot on and he never lets you down with his composition.  His use of words is about as literal as de Kooning’s use ofembedding newspaper or Motherwell’s use of French cigarette wrappers.  Neither of those two artists would be hailed as progenitors of the Pop (Picabia would seem closer for that role.)

I do think that it is important to praise and affirm the one voice that will give the lie to the passive acceptance of revisionism.  Thank you once again for being that voice!

Gallery Chronicle (September 2016)

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2016

On “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One of the many revelations to come out of “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913,” the excellent exhibition organized three years ago by Gail Stavitsky at the Montclair Art Museum, was a small watercolor of a rowboat on a lake. A blond woman leans over the stern, nearly submerging it in water as she seemingly smiles back at us. Behind her, standing on the upturned bow, a man twists on one leg as he attempts to remove his trousers—startled, it would appear, at our arrival.

Immediate, part quick illustration, part louche intrusion, the work may have been as shocking for its content in 1912 as it would be to us, today, for its attribution. Titled Romance or The Doctor, this watercolor was one of five examples to be put on display in the 1913 Armory Show by none other than Stuart Davis (1892–1964), the American modernist whose work would soon take a bold turn away from such realistic scenes towards angular shapes, flattened colors, and the interweaving of text and imagery.

At the time the promising disciple of Robert Henri and “The Eight,” just twenty-one years old, Davis was among those American artists most affected by the radical examples of European modernism that came stateside for the Armory Show’s infamous three-city tour—a “masochistic reception,” he later recalled, “whereat the naïve hosts are trampled and stomped by the European guests at the buffet.”

Yet with his watercolors exhibited alongside eye-opening examples of modernist painting by Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Duchamp, Davis also saw the “vindication of the anti-academy position of the Henri School, with developments in undreamed of directions.” The awakening was pure Davis, telling us a great deal of how he saw through the surface of style and looked to deeper meaning, always staying independent of trends. At that time, Davis was one of the artists whose interest in saloon life and popular entertainment would earn him the label of “ash can,” a term meant as opprobrium for his focus on the underbelly of American culture and the one that came to define the movement of his older contemporaries.

The particular genius of Davis’s subsequent modernist direction was how he went on to integrate European stylistic innovation with his unique Ashcan vision. Through the flattening, flickering, fleeting perspectives of modernist composition, Davis did not so much abandon his Ashcan beginnings. Instead he found ways to electrify them, to broadcast the frenetic American century with the syncopation of jazz and to illuminate it with the glow of neon.

Just take his House and Street (1931), from the Whitney’s collection, where windows, fire escapes, garages, smoke stacks, scaffolding, advertising symbols, and campaign signs all come together like the colorful pieces of a jigsaw puzzle framed by the shadows of an elevated train. Or consider the frenzied cataract of Ultra-Marine(1943), a favorite of mine from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where any lingering sense of single-point perspective is overtaken by Davis’s development of “serial centers” of focus. And then there is The Paris Bit (1959), also from the Whitney, a late masterstroke where colors, silhouettes, signs, and shadow lines seem to reassemble not as a single image but as a long-remembered impression—a deep feeling coming together out of forgotten sights.

So the fact that “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing,” a major, traveling exhibition now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, would omit Davis’s entire early Ashcan development, and instead start its show in the 1920s, would seem to do a curious disservice to both Davis’s own achievements and the understanding of the museum-going public.1

That this omission of “Davis’s decade of apprenticeship” turns out to be a deliberate “interpretive gambit” meant to “depart in significant ways from their predecessors,” as the co-directors of the Whitney and the National Gallery explain in their catalogue preface, is a startling revelation of curatorial intent that hints not only at Davis’s evolving place in the canon of American art but also at the shifting interests of the contemporary American museum.

We are therefore left with an exhibition that is both required viewing for what it reveals of Davis’s American vision but also a flawed, precariously off-balance presentation of that vision. With approximately one hundred works on display, there is, it should be said, much to be thankful for here. Despite the over half-century of Davis research that has followed the artist’s death in 1964, a complete chronology has only recently come to light with the publication of his catalogue raisonné by Ani Boyajian, Mark Rutkoski, William C. Agee, and Karen Wilkin in 2007, as well as—finally—the full access to his archives granted by the artist’s estate. Through her catalogue essay and wall texts, at least, the Whitney’s Barbara Haskell, our most dutiful curator of early American modernism and the co-curator of this exhibition, gives every indication of a deep interest in the full span of Davis’s development, including the early history. Her extensive catalogue chronology, starting with Davis’s childhood in Philadelphia, where his father was a graphic artist and art editor, on through his life and career at the center of bohemian New York, furthermore offers a singular addition to Davis scholarship.

At the same time, it must be increasingly difficult to propose a major museum survey of a canonical artist that relies on scholarship alone and does not attempt realignment and revisionism. Writing in 1965 at the time of Davis’s memorial exhibition, H. H. Arnason of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum summed up the then-established consensus: “Davis is almost the only American painter of the twentieth century whose works have transcended every change in style, movement, or fashion.” Such an appreciation only occurs when you consider Davis’s development in his own time. Yet in a reversal of priorities that is fast becoming the norm of museums today, rather than allowing history to challenge our present assumptions, the past must now conform to contemporary diktats. In Davis’s case, this means understanding the artist not on his own terms but for the movement he inadvertently foreshadowed—pop—the one art movement, it would seem, that is now unquestionably allowed to occupy our own time and place.

There is no other reason to start a Davis survey with his paintings of illusionistic flattened packaging of the 1920s than to frame him as a pop artist. And indeed, “framed” is right, since there is reason here to suspect that Davis has been framed. Calling these paintings of consumer products “Davis’s breakthrough,” the exhibition narrows Davis’s achievements to one that merely “merged the bold, hard-edge style of advertising with the conventions of European avant-garde painting.” Forget the fact that this particular imagery is part of an older tradition going back to the nineteenth century in American trompe l’oeil and might be considered something of a tributary in the main currents of his artistic development. Why not instead look to his more innovative cubist still lifes, also from the early 1920s, and now in the collection of the Vilcek Foundation?

Framing the far end of his career, the exhibition likewise gives disproportionate meaning to Davis’s interest in returning to older compositions. The observation that Davis revisited his earlier work is nothing new. In 1965 Arnason noted “how often he experimented with a theme or motif, put it aside, and then years later returned to it and developed it into a major painting or a series of paintings.” Yet here this is treated as divine revelation, of what? Pop seriality, and then some.

In creating this exhibition, Barbara Haskell was joined by Harry Cooper of the National Gallery, who gets equal billing. I suspect much of the pop obsession has originated with this co-curator whose credits include a role in the recent Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. Cooper’s catalogue essay, titled “Unfinished Business: Davis and the Dialect-X of Recursion,” is certainly guilty of blanketing Davis in theoretical cant and, simply put, offering one of the most overwrought examples of art writing I have ever seen—repeatedly exhorting his readers to “let us” join him in his leaps of incredulity. Just let us consider, for instance, Cooper’s take on the painting Memo, a mystical composition from 1956 of angular white lines, letters, and numbers folded into fields of red, green, and black:

Let us take the final step: Memo is a Marxist abstraction . . . the Marxism is present in its absence. (Canceled and preserved: such is Hegel’s mind-bending logic.) It has disappeared and keeps disappearing. Marx is a four-letter word beginning with m.

“Present in its absence” might describe much of the logic in this essay on Davis’s “recursive” imagery, which concludes by again choosing to see what is not there in Davis’s moving final painting:

Finally, the loop has a rapport with the spiral, that geometric figure often invoked to visualize Hegel’s dialectic in its back-and-forth winding ascent to the far-off goal (in The Phenomenology, 1807) of Spirit in possession of itself, outside of time, no longer divided. . . . His last painting, left on his easel at his death and still swaddled in masking tape, includes the word fin, possibly inspired by the last frame of a French movie he had been watching on TV. The word is often taken as a premonition of death, but who can say? Another possibility is that the word, like many of Davis’s, like the painting itself, is just incomplete, unFINished.

The great shame of this exhibition’s pop psychology, or more likely pop psychosis, is how its archival research has indirectly illuminated a more relevant understanding of Davis’s methodology. Far from the superficial coolness of pop, Davis was the hottest of artists. He incorporated the visual landscape of popular culture not as pop commentaries but as personal expressions. He deployed modernist innovations such as cubist simultaneity but, unlike European examples, he looked beneath the surface. Mere “visible phenomena,” as Barbara Haskell explains, “ignored what he believed was true about perception—that it involves the totality of one’s consciousness. He reasoned that if his art were to be truly realistic, it must include his ideas, emotions, and memories of other experiences.”

Davis’s recursions were part of these personal excavations that folded memory, sound, and feeling into ever-evolving compositions. This means that his Rapt at Rappaport’s (1951–52), a painting from middle age, could convey the polka-dot paper of the toy store on Third Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street where his parents once shopped—and where he, at one time, could have been “rapt” in its wrapping. The legacy of Stuart Davis is a similar gift, a feeling for the twentieth century wrapped in its own unique, wonderful packaging.

1 “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on June 10 and remains on view through September 25, 2016. The exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. from November 20, 2016, through March 5, 2017; the De Young Museum, San Francisco, from April 8 through August 6, 2017; and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, from September 16, 2017, through January 8, 2018.