Reading Around

There is a long report in The Detroit Free Press here on the political-economic vicissitudes of the Detroit Institute of the Arts. More generally, The Free Press also ran this extended, eye-opening report on the course of Detroit's political and economic disaster.

Benjamin Sachs (Harvard Law) sketched a new model for union organizing here in The New York Times last week.

In this OpEd at The Los Angeles Times Rebecca Solnit urges us to take the long view on Occupy and its legacy. (A longer version of the essay is here.) And at The Nation Allison Kilkenny offers this lament on where the dissipated movement currently stands.

Economist Dani Rodrik here on the troubles religion poses to Turkish democracy.

Political Scientist Ian Lustick in The New York Times here yesterday on the impossibility of a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Added a bit later:  I meant to include a link to this report from The Brooking Institution - "The Algebra Imperative" - that underscores the work of Bob Moses and his Algebra Project in preparing students for math literacy and, thereby full political and economic citizenship.

DIA Statement on Proposed Sale of Its Collection

"The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) has learned that Christie’s, at the request of the Emergency Manager, plans to proceed with a valuation of the DIA collection, and we will be cooperating completely in that process. However, we continue to believe there is no reason to value the collection as the Attorney General has made clear that the art is held in charitable trust and cannot be sold as part of a bankruptcy proceeding. We applaud the EM's focus on rebuilding the City, but would point out that he undercuts that core goal by jeopardizing Detroit's most important cultural institution.

In addition, recent moves in Oakland and Macomb counties to invalidate the tri-county millage if art is sold virtually ensure that any forced sale of art would precipitate the rapid demise of the DIA. Removing $23 million in annual operating funds – nearly 75% of the museum’s operating budget – and violating the trust of donors and supporters would cripple the museum, putting an additional financial burden on our already struggling city. The DIA has long been doing business without City of Detroit operating support; any move that compromises its financial stability will endanger the museum and further challenge the City’s future."

That is the statement issued today by DIA in response to the ongoing and extremely wrongheaded effort to sell off its collection to satisfy bond holders and avoid placing financial responsibility where it squarely resides - on political and economic elits and their destructive, self-defeating decisions over several decades. There is nothing much to add.

Detroit ~ Ruins and Responsibility

Photograph © Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre. 

Photograph © Andrew Moore.

A couple of related items popped up on my news feed recently. The first is this older piece (2011) from Guernica on disaster photography in Detroit. The author is discussing The Ruins of Detroit and Detroit Disassembled projects by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and Andrew Moore respectively. In this passage - the relevance of which will come clearer in a moment - the author, John Patrick Leary, rightly is critical:

"But other photos tend towards overwrought melodrama . . .  Moore leans on the compositional tactic of ironic juxtaposition, an old standby of documentary city photography since at least the days of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt. In one photograph (repeated in Marchand and Meffre’s collection) of the East Grand Boulevard Methodist church, its Biblical invocation, “And you shall say that God did it,” looms above its sanctuary. The irony is obvious, heavy-handedly so, yet the photographer’s meaning is less clear. One feels obliged to raise the obvious defense of the Almighty here: If anyone or anything “did it,” General Motors and the Detroit City Council had a hell of a lot more to do with it than God did. And who said God was ever here in the first place?"

The images Leary mentions are those I've lifted above This brings me to the next of the items in my news feed. It is this pointed column by Scott Martelle at WaPo entitled "Five Myths About Detroit." Not only was it not God who flushed Detroit, it was not rampaging black rioters or the unions. It was the usual suspects - corporate and political elites. Mostly Martelle is on point. But I reject this insipid
claim:

"Yet scapegoating corporate leaders shifts responsibility from where it belongs: on us. We’ve voted for leaders who endorse policies that require corporate brass to make decisions based on their responsibility to stockholders. Blaming corporations for maximizing profits is like blaming a dog for barking. If we want businesses to behave differently, we need to change our laws and our expectations."

He is right that it is important to assert democratic control over political-economic decisions. But that is not going to happen simply in the voting booth. And, as elite response to the efforts by OWS (for example) to push a more radically democratic agenda attest, it is not going to occur without significant resistance from those elites.

Detroit in Ruins

William Livingstone House, Brush Park, a French Renaissance-style house designed by Albert Kahn in 1893 and demolished since this photograph was taken. Photograph © Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

I've spent part of every summer for the past dozen and a half years in southeast Michigan and have mixed feeling about the region. On the one hand, Ann Arbor where I teach is too preening and precious for my taste - by a considerable amount. On the other hand, Detroit - which I have to traverse in each direction to get to Ann Arbor - makes me cringe. It is an amplified version of the political economic disasters in Rochester and the other urban areas across Western NY. Each of these cities is an extremely unflattering monument to both capitalism and political corruption. I've posted here about Detroit several times and about Rochester  here  more than that. In any case, The Guardian has run this series of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre of the crumbling ruins of Detroit. They remind me of work Robert Polidori and others have done on the 'exclusion zones' surrounding Chernobyl. I've posted on that work here a couple of times before. In this instance the catastrophe was economic implosion rather than technological and ecological disaster. These images are very, very far from a complete portrait of Detroit. But they convey an important dimension of what is wrong with the US these days.

Democracy & the Arts in Detroit (2)

This is a follow-up on this earlier post in light of the not bankruptcy filing of the city of Detroit yesterday. The collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts apparently is on the cutting block again. Here is a report from The New York Times. The choice should not be between paying pensioners and maintaining cultural heritage. Let the bond-holders eat cake.

Democracy & the Arts in Detroit

 Twin Tornadoes (1990) © Gilda Snowden and DIA.

For many years I've pretty regularly made special trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts from my teaching gig in Ann Arbor. Not only is it egregiously anti-democratic to have Detroit under the thumb of an appointed emergency manager, but this dispute over whether the City can sell the collection at the DIA to pay off debt suggests just why anyone in that position is bound to have a myopic view of what is "good" for the City. Selling off art is an inestimably bad idea.

The Conventional View of Detroit

A mural in East Detroit. Photograph © Danny Wilcox-Frazier.

I pinched this photograph from a photo essay, entitled "Elegy for Detroit," at Mother Jones. (You can find yet another, equally bleak, collection of photos by the same photographer here, also at Mother Jones.) I missed it last fall when it appeared. But I have a sense of deja vu thinking about it. I posted here about a similar vision of the city a while back and what I said then applies in this instance as well. I won't repeat myself other than to say that Detroit, like, for instance, all of the cities across Western New York, is a third world country. And photographers seem to be treating such locations as such - sites of despair and hopelessness, nothing more. This conventional view seems to me not so much false as (for reasons I advance in my earlier post) very partial.

Picturing Detroit

Photograph from Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion essay
"Detroit: The Troubled City". © Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos.

This month I am in SE Michigan, teaching at the ICPSR Summer Program; this is something I do every year. In order to get to Ann Arbor from Rochester you have to drive through Detroit. And pretty much every year I make the effort to get over to the city for one or another reason. In any case, checking out the Magnum blog today I came across this new blog entry discussing this new photo essay "Detroit ~ The Troubled City" by Bruce Gilden. It seems to me that a couple of things need saying.

Let's stipulate that Gilden is a terrific photographer in the technical sense. He makes powerful images. Let's stipulate too, that his intentions are admirable. He is trying to call attention to what he sees as a travesty in America. Then let's ask if he has a clue. Because that is what I look for in photography. What is the photographer depicting and what are those depictions used for. In this case, I think Gilden misses a lot of the story. We get doom and gloom but nothing else. And, without wanting to come off as naive (something I am typically not accused of being), I think he misses a lot by taking too superficial a focus.* This leads him to be simultaneously overly optimistic and overly pessimistic.

In the first place, contrary to the connection Gilden is making, the dire scenes and streetscapes he offers are not a new phenomena. They have been exacerbated by the current financial crisis. But the physical disintegration of the city has been happening for decades, largely as a result of economic disinvestment. Gilden rightly complains about the moribund city government that has presided over the disaster in Detroit. He might have added remarks about the State and Federal governments too.

But the underlying problem has been that economic agents - firms and employers - have abandoned Detroit (and many other cities like, for instance, Pittsfield Mass., where I grew up and Rochester, New York where I now work). They have taken their money and the jobs and moved away. The result has been an emaciated tax base and rampant unemployment. Those residents who could've moved out of the cities to follow the jobs often have done so. Those who could not have been left behind. In other words, the collapse of Detroit is not just a story about continuing corruption and buffoonery on the part of local politicos (look here for the most recent installment). That would make it a story of failure when, in fact, it is a story about processes integral to the operation of the American political-economy. We cannot fix what's wrong with Detroit simply with more FBI investigations.

On the other hand, by focusing on the surface - on the foreclosures and abandoned property, Gilden may be missing dynamic processes that are taking place out of his sight. Not long ago I noted here a series of essays by Rebecca Solnit about how residents of American cities are struggling against considerable odds (and also against the expectations of many more comfortably situated Americans) to bootstrap themselves out from decay and devastation. One of Solnit's essays is about Detroit (you can find it here). Solnit, of course, peddles hope and in the process seeks out actions, events and people who afford us grounds for it. I admire her for that. But I also admire her for not being naive. She isn't. Just as the voices in Gilden's photo-essay speak of resorting to criminal violence and fomenting insurrection, some of those Solnit describes are racists or despairing or both. But she also points to other creative, organized responses to urban decay and abandonment too. She has collected her essays into a book - A Paradise Built in Hell - which is due out later this summer. In a very short recent interview about the book Solnit remarks:

"Being in a situation where people die and systems are disrupted can have powerful emotional consequences, but to think that everyone who is in such a situation is damaged doesn't address the importance of people's strength and the support they find. This vision of human frailty ties into related pictures of human nature: that we fall apart in disasters, that we need institutions to regulate us because of our weakness and wickedness, and that we should be afraid of a great many things. These serve an authoritarian and divided society, and maybe what one of my sources calls “the trauma industry,” but don't serve most of us well at all."

It seems to me that, despite his intentions, Gilden risks contributing to the overly dire and pessimistic view that Solnit describes and thereby risks abetting the social-political-economic agents and institutions and organizations that will spring up to exploit fear and anxiety. I may not want to follow Solnit everywhere she goes politically. But I think she points us in what (potentially at least) is a considerably more productive direction than does Gilden.
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* In fairness there is a discrepancy between what Gilden writes in the blog post and the voices he presents in the photo essay. So I am not being entirely fair.

P.S.: (5 July 09) I just happened across yet another lament for Detroit here at openDemocracy; the author, Ross Perlin, is significantly less sanguine, I think, than is Solnit. He looks at the decay of the city and the local agricultural and artistic responses it has elicited and concludes: "The artists deliver a harangue to accompany the decay, a raging against the dying of the light, but no end to the decay itself."

Things to Do in SE Michigan This Summer?

Well, each summer I try to go to the Institute for the Arts in Detroit while I am in the area. They have absolutely terrific Diego Rivera murals as well as a wonderful collection of African-American Art. Last summer I missed the museum (almost) entirely because they'd shut large portions for renovations and this evening I learned that they are closing completely starting tomorrow. So, another disappointment!

I thought about the University of Michigan Art Museum but they are not much help this summer either. They do have an interesting exhibition coming up "The Rouge" which is a project by British Photographer Michael Kenna. But that will not show until next spring! In any case, Kenna's work is very interesting. The imagery is extraordinary. He has done a lot of night photography at large industrial sites. The exhibition coming to Ann Arbor is of the industrial landscape at the River Rouge plant in Dearborn; he also has done a project on the Radcliffe Power Station in Nottinghamshire (see below) as well as a retrospective on the Nazi extermination camps. Once again, thought there is a political reticence that I find odd. Here is a snippet from one of the interviews posted on Kenna's web page:

"For 12 years, Kenna photographed Nazi concentration camps, visiting 27 of them, sometimes repeatedly, from 1988-2000. It started at Banbury, with the mountain of shaving brushes that emerged from the communal developer tray in a photo by a fellow student who had taken a bus tour in Poland. “I felt repulsion, and a powerful intrigue. It kindled in me the desire to know more about the Holocaust, taught only briefly at school,” he says.

Ribbons of Birkenau railroad tracks stream out to a sentinel of trees in the misty distance. Dead vines choke a barbed wire fence in Gross Rosen. Like weeds strangling a neglected lawn, a heap of wire-rimmed eyeglasses lay snarled and knotted in Auschwitz. More interpretive than documentary, Kenna’s images facilitate our gaze, so we can never forget. “But if these photographs let us remember the Nazi barbarism, they also suggest the peace. Good is in them as much as, and maybe more than, evil,” says Pierre Borhan, director of Patrimoine Photographique, in an email to me. The Paris photography organization included Kenna’s photos in their 2001 group exhibition, “Mémoire des Camps.” The year before, Kenna donated 300 of his 6,000 negatives and prints (and their rights) to the French Ministry of Culture. The rest he gave to the Caen Memorial, a museum for peace in Caen, France.

The same benign stance in Kenna’s concentration camp photos shows in his images of the Ratcliffe Power Station in England and the Rouge Steel Works in Dearborn, Michigan. “I may point a finger, but I try not to make judgments,” he says. “I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don’t think it’s necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories.” The story Chris Pichler of Portland, publisher of Nazraeli Press based in Tucson, Arizona, tells is one of the “ghost-like presence” that he feels in Kenna’s work, especially his industrial landscapes. “There’s an ominous beauty, a little bit fraught with danger.” "




Ratcliffe Power Station, Study 21, Nottinghamshire, England. 1984.
© Michael Kenna.















Ratcliffe Power Station, Study 31, Notting- hamshire, England. 1987 © Michael Kenna



Sure, I agree, these are "ominous." So are many of Kenna's other images - even those of non-industrial scenes. I find that not just odd, but disturbing. Perhaps we should take the images as a warning of some sort? Perhaps I am being unfair, but there is a certain de-politicizing impulse here. As Kenna says in another interview, speaking of another topic: "I believe it is most unwise to think that we have much control over events and people." Depending on whom Kenna includes in the "we" this is either admirable or defeatist. I am unsure. And as I said I may be being unfair. In any case, I find his photographs thoroughly impressive. To bad they are not being shown here this summer.