The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Scavenged Space

Alley Culture

Alley Culture is a gallery in a converted garage behind a house in the Woodbridge neighborhood of Detroit. The gallery displays works by contemporary artists on exposed wood-frame walls, with visitors kept warm in the winter by a wood-burning stove. The hidden urban setting and unfinished architectural form of Alley Culture correspond to the gallery's alternative curatorial program, described by its founders as “a cross-pollination of politics, geography and generations.” This cross-pollination is made manifest in Alley Culture's hybrid status as both an exhibition space and a community meeting place. “The Art World is not to be differentiated from the Hood”: this claim, set out on the gallery's website, is central to both Alley Culture's location and work.

One of the founders of Alley Culture, the artist Sherry Hendrick, was a member of a Manhattan-based art group Collaborative Projects (Colab), which was dedicated to collaboration both between the members of the group and between the group and the public. During its lifetime in the 1980s, Collaborative Projects organized many of Manhattan's politically progressive artists and exploited the availability of under-used or unused property in the city.

Alley Culture translates the ambitions of Collaborative Projects to Detroit and to Detroit's specific conditions, challenges and possibilities. As well as hosting curated exhibitions, Alley Culture also organizes “Voice of the People” exhibitions, determined by artists who choose to participate in them; annual seed exchanges, where locally grown organic seeds are distributed; occasional showings of alternative films; and a web-based listing of local shops and services. This complex mix of activities is focused by the gallery's interest in sustaining neighborhood and urban culture and resisting the homogenizing forces of conventional urban “development.”

Grafikjam Alleys

The Grafikjam Alleys are a series of alleys in a section of Southwest Detroit where home owners have allowed their garages to be graffitied by neighborhood youth. These youth were brought into an urban art program, “Grafikjam,” by the neighborhood organization, Young Nation. In this program, urban art, and, in particular, graffiti, is used as an entry-point into a pedagogy of drawing, painting and “community responsibility”—an obligation to maintain the quality of life in a neighborhood. Program participants are given material to paint garages; they are also conscripted to remove “non-permissive graffiti” on other buildings in the neighborhood.

The division of graffiti into “permitted” and “non-permitted” forms, the division of buildings into acceptable and unacceptable sites for graffiti, and the top-down formation of a socially responsible graffiti crew represent attempts to simultaneously encourage and domesticate personal expression. At the same time, however, the Grafikjam Alleys supercede the limits of the program that produced them; it is not only the product of an attempt to corral graffiti into socially acceptable forms, practices and spaces, but also a novel transformation of one part of the single-family home into a publicly available site of expressive creativity.

The Lot

The Lot was an outdoor exhibition venue founded by Kathy Leisen. Originally located in North Corktown, next door to Leisen's house, The Lot consisted of two empty house plots. According to Leisen, exhibitions in this space were “designed to challenge the way we think about the context of art, community, and dialogue by highlighting the value and joy of experimentation.” This mission was accomplished by opening The Lot to “a diversity of local, national, and international artists, both emerging and established artists, writers, waitresses, taxi drivers, hair stylists, athletes, office assistants, historians, dental hygienists, and pop singers”—in another words, to a range of communities, whether existing, possible or imagined. If The Lot was a community-building project, then this building was not a reconstruction of an already-extant community identified with the already-extant topography of a neighborhood. Rather, “community” was here an object to investigate, re-think and design, as well as something that could transcend its customary “local” limits.

The conversion of crab grass covered vacant lots into a venue for art was accomplished by almost no physical transformation of the site; only freestanding letters spelling “The Lot” identified the site. After two years, The Lot became a nomadic exhibition venue, temporarily occupying other vacant lots in Detroit, again identified only by freestanding letters. The Lot's spatialization, then, was primarily conceptual, based on an understanding of vacancy not as a problem to fix but an opportunity to exploit; “site-specificity” here became an appreciation of what is absent from a site, as well as what is present.

Submerge

Submerge is the major production and distribution company for electronic music in Detroit. For Mike Banks, the company's co-founder, this music possesses vital cultural and political agencies in the post-industrial city—a place where predominantly African-American populations are “bombarded by audio and visual stereotypes that are essentially a guide for failure.” Banks thereby creates and curates music as part of an “ongoing Electronic Warfare with the programmers who seek to contain our minds.”

Detroit techno—the city's particular version of electronic music—is not only characterized by its layered sound, fast tempo, and engagement with funk music, but also by its mode of production. Many early techno musicians chose to found their own independent labels, giving them ownership and control of their work, but also many administrative challenges. In the late 1980s, Submerge was co-founded by Banks, then part of the music collective, Underground Resistance, and Christa Weatherspoon; it was intended as a platform to support independent music collectives in Detroit, allowing them to share business services and know-how so that they could distribute their work most effectively.

In 2002, Submerge completed the renovation of a former laundry workers union hall into a new building to replace its former “appointment-only” headquarters. This new building includes a series of venues to complement those of the club, where the public most often encounters dance music: “Exhibit: 3000,” a museum dedicated to preserving the history of Detroit electronic music; “Somewhere in Detroit,” a record store and meeting place for electronic music listeners; and the “Metroplex Room,” a space for film screenings, exhibitions, discussions, seminars and parties.

With its variety of spaces and programs, the Submerge building allows music to not only be produced and consumed, but also imagined, experienced, archived, studied and discussed—each an activity that is capable of releasing music's activist force. According to Banks, “by using the untapped energy potential of sound we are going to destroy this wall (between races) in much the same way as certain frequencies shatter glass”; unreal estate makes urban space available for this, and other, counter-hegemonic projects.

Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit

The Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit was founded in 1979 by Detroit-based artists Charles McGee and Jean Hielbrunn. Its founding was a response to Detroit's condition as a place where contemporary art was intensively produced, but also where public venues for exhibiting this art were lacking. While the institutionalization of art often implies a stifling of creativity, initiative and vision, the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit assayed a critical institutionalization, a deployment of institutionality against the grain by a self-organized artists' collective dedicated to the production of new connections between art and community.

For its first twenty-five years of existence, the Institute functioned nomadically, organizing and curating exhibitions and installations at a series of public sites throughout Detroit. In 2004, the Institute took over a building that was occupied by Detroit Contemporary, a gallery in operation from 1998 to 2003 that was co-founded by artists Aaron Timlin and Phaedra Robinson, founder of the Center for Creative eXchange.

The Detroit Contemporary building, owned by Timlin, was a formerly abandoned house sited amidst many vacant lots in the Woodbridge neighborhood. Located in this building, the Institute has been able to greatly broaden its activities, curating not only a regular series of art exhibitions but also a variety of music, dance, and other performance-based events, many of them organized by community groups. At the same time, the location of the Institute in a fraught urban site where “art,” contemporary or otherwise, appears to be fugitive or absent has only heightened the tendentious nature of the Institute's own institutionality.

With their caretakers frequently preoccupied with immediate tasks of survival, objects in the city of unreal estate are often left behind, disowned or abandoned. Precisely as such, however, these objects offer themselves for repossession, for becoming strange in new hands.

Yet it's not only objects that are lost in the city of unreal estate, but also identities, ambitions and plans of action; the city alienates both objects from subjects and subjects from themselves. Thus, the finders of lost objects can also, as it is said, “find themselves.” Accumulating and arranging castoffs and discards, they become caretakers, curators, or outsider artists, claiming unreal estate to archive and arrange unreal estate's particular material culture.