Care of the City

Slought is pleased to announce "Care of the City," a conversation on Monday, April 18, 2016 from 6:30-8:30pm with Michael Stone-Richards and others about caring and the routines of habit which establish spaces as livable. The program will begin with a short presentation by Stone-Richards, followed by conversation with Bethany Wiggin and Jean-Michel Rabaté.

What, in the context of Detroit industrial and cultural histories, is a ruin? In many respects, the irritation felt by some at others' fascination with the ruin-objects of Detroit is a reaction-formation at becoming voyeuristic objects. In a strange way, the voyeurism built into the origins of the Western camera has now turned its gaze from exotic "others" to ourselves. Yet the form of art practice for which Detroit is increasingly gaining attention outside Detroit is not the ruin as such, but a predominantly post-Studio approach to art, of which Social Practice has become the dominant form. Social Practice is, indeed, an art of the city, where the city is taken as a historically conditioned and sedimented medium.

The conversation at Slought will build upon these considerations, as well as Michael Stone-Richards's writings about Scott Hocking's Garden of the Gods, 2009-2011. In this series, Hockings develops installations made from onsite materials–including reinforced concrete columns, with broken, used televisions atop the columns–on the collapsed roof of the Packard plant in Detroit, Michigan. The installation and constructed imagery capture a mythic landscape in snow, in a field of ruins. The exposed metal supports in the collapsed roof and columns appear like a form of drawing; the work of distancing inherent to the project makes the experience not an image but a social construction. The photograph thus becomes a partial indexical record or witness, an artistic artifact bearing upon the problematic of ruination and the archeological.