- Public Secrecy
- Chapter
- University of Michigan Press
- pp. 131-144
-
- View Citation
- Additional Information
Public Secrecy
Hygienic Dress League
The Hygienic Dress League is a corporation that creates nothing but its own corporate image. It therefore uses videos, fashion shoots, branding and advertising not as means to the end of selling products or services but as reflexive artistic works. Recognizable as advertising, albeit of an enigmatic variety, these works invite questions about themselves (what exactly are they advertising?) and about corporate modes of identity and publicity more generally.
The League's project exploits the availability of urban space and urban surface in Detroit to unprofitable expertise. Its advertisements are painted on the boards that seal up abandoned buildings, re-purposing instruments of physical closure into ones of conceptual opening. Announcing the presence of the League and the “coming soon” of something left unspecified, these advertisements also focus attention on Detroit as an object of relentless campaigns of betterment. These campaigns, premised on the inadequacy or incompleteness of the city in its current state, pose Detroit's present as nothing but the prehistory of a hoped-for future. Exaggerating this condition, the Hygienic Dress League brings Detroit's obsessive futurology into public visibility and allows it to be newly scrutinized or resisted.
Secret Pizza Party
Secret Pizza Party was a design studio founded and run by Josh Dunn and Andy DeGiulio, two graduates of Detroit's College of Creative Studies. As well as doing commercial work, the studio also engaged in ambient advertising campaigns in which signs were posted on the facades of abandoned buildings throughout Detroit. These signs depicted slogans that ran from the vaguely exhortative (“Make Things Better”) to the enigmatically descriptive (“The Whole Why World”).
The campaigns conducted by Secret Pizza Party exploited the surfaces of abandoned buildings as public space available for speech acts to a collective audience. These speech acts, though formatted like advertising, were conspicuously open-ended. “Make Things Better” seems an appropriate injunction to be made in Detroit, yet it does not describe what should be made better, who should make things better, and how things should be made better. “The Whole Why World” (from a 2006 New York Times article on second-graders, one of whom mistranslated the phrase “the whole wide world”) similarly points to a city whose mysteries, challenges and problems continually provoke the question “why?” Both campaigns, then, alluded to Detroit's constantly narrated problems but left the identification and potential solutions to those problems unspecified and so up to its audience to determine.
Trtl
In 2003 and 2004, abandoned buildings, bridges and road signs in and around downtown Detroit began to be tagged with graffiti featuring cartoon turtles and the words “trtl,” “trdl,” “turdl,” “turtl,” or “turtdlz.” After turtles appeared on a sculpture outside of the Detroit Artists' Market and on the Detroit Institute of Art's regal building, turtle-tagging became the object of police attention, public critique and media speculation alike.
Most generally, turtles were understood to signify “slowness.” Their status as subject matter for graffiti in Detroit was thus posed as a comment on the slowness with which Detroit was being reconstructed, as if the graffiti were calling for the eradication of the derelict surfaces on which they were themselves inscribed. More precisely, however, the enigmatic action of turtle-tagging converted the city's surfaces into mirrors that reflected the the city's own collective sense of itself. The “slowness” ascribed to the turtle-tagger, outed by the Detroit Free Press in 2004 as the graffiti artist, Ronald Scherz, was actually a product of the artist's audience. This audience saw an image they themselves projected onto turtles—the image of a city historically constructed on the basis of mobility and speed but one currently defined by torpor and inacitivity.
Both within and beyond the city of unreal estate, the possibilities for sanctuary dwindle; there are fewer and fewer places offering haven or refuge. What replaces these places are facilities and centers—institutions where judgments are passed and fates decided. Sidewalks, parks and abandoned buildings house the homeless human remainder of this dynamic.
There are also places, however, where radical forms of hospitality continue to be extended. Sites of radical hospitality can extend no farther than a city block or encompass an entire neighborhood. They offer refuge both to the homeless and to those whose homes lose the capacity to shelter. These are places where visitors are welcomed as citizens of a usually disregarded or unknown city. This is the city of unreal estate—a city that shadows, faintly but fantastically, the city documented on maps, patrolled by authorities, divided into public and private, inhabited and empty, saved and lost.