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Each month, thousands of residents leave Detroit, never to return again. The city is allegedly too dangerous to live in and beyond saving.But for the local artists, the desolate urban landscape is a precious incentive.Detroit has faced an enormous population exodus following the collapse of the American automotive industry. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler had once been expected to guarantee prosperity for generations to come, but in 2007, one can hardly imagine a more unreal urban landscape than downtown Detroit, the largest city in the American mid-western state of Michigan. More than half of the office buildings are empty. Only two large sports stadiums, a few casinos and CompuWare and General Motors headquarters provide a vestige of a commercial city centre. In the evenings and weekends, when most of the 75,000 CompuWare and General Motors employees have made their exodus out to the safety of the suburbs, the heart of the once so proud Motor City is all but dead. The occasional taxi drives past, a lonely shadow slips under the streetlights and clouds of steam from underground conduits puff up from the streets.Along Woodward Avenue, the once grand boulevard transecting the city from north to south, 80% of the houses are empty. Stately mansions, in better days the homes of the upper echelons of a flourishing automobile industry, now serve as squats or clubhouses for local gangs, or are left to rot because the city has no money to tear them down. Where abandoned houses have in fact been demolished, the occasional entrepreneur is attempting to grow vegetables and fruit: urban farming. Some sections of downtown Detroit are so deserted that deer, pheasants and foxes have moved in.For the local artists, the desolate urban landscape is an enormous stimulus. ‘See that hovel over there?’ asks Jacque, of Detroit Demolition Disneyland (DDD), a Detroit artists’ group, as he points to a completely dilapidated building on Woodward Avenue. ‘That is because I pointed it out to you.’ Then he points to what must once have been a huge, stately mansion. ‘You no doubt did notice that house.’ As if I could have missed it: the building has been painted bright orange, without a single detail left uncovered. Even the leaves of the ivy are painted orange. It makes the terrible state of the mansion all the more poignant. An accumulation of rubbish and all kinds of junk bulge out of the glassless window frames. The porch at the back of the house has completely caved in. Freshly fallen snow reinforces the contrast between the bright orange and the immediate surroundings, which are grey and dismal, as if to say: you who grow up here, give up all hope. ‘We call it The House That Used To Not Be There’, Jacque says proudly.Along with Jacques, DDD has three other members. Like him, they want only their first names in print. ‘It is not about us, but about our work and the city of Detroit.’ Under the title of Object Orange, the young artists (all four are in their twenties) paint abandoned, decrepit houses orange. Their objective is to get the city authorities to tear down the ruins. ‘An empty house in an urban environment is immediately associated with “bad”, a symbol for drugs, prostitution, rape. It is better to have an empty patch of ground than an abandoned house.’According to Jacque, one of the greatest dangers for Detroit is that Detroiters themselves no longer see the decay. ‘Before you realize it, you don’t see it anymore. You just ignore it.’ The bright orange seemed best for the project for several reasons. ‘It is very easy to see, it is the colour of road signs indicating detours, it is the colour of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine and it is the type of orange used in Disney films – tiggerific orange. That gives it something ironic, because it emphasizes that the problem of empty properties and decay is taking place in wealthy America, the land of Walt Disney.’

Orange Ruins

Visibility is one of the key words of the Object Orange project, and because Detroit, like so many other American cities, is a place where everything is done by car, the collective only paints houses that can be seen from main roads and highways. The project is beginning to bear fruit: four of the 14 orange houses have already been torn down. At the moment, most of the Object Orange properties are in the Highland Park neighbourhood, a section of Detroit with its own district administration, which – if such a thing is possible – has even less money at its disposal than the city itself. ‘I swear to you,’ says Jacque, ‘Highland Park is just like Sarajevo right after the civil war.’ Not a word of this is exaggerated. There is virtually not a house that looks habitable, the streets are overgrown with weeds and in some places just come to dead ends. The only sign of life on this freezing-cold day is a small group of men drinking out of plastic cups on the porch of a partly burned-out house. ‘Highland Park does not even have the money to tear down the houses, let alone a budget to maintain roads, or for something like education.’ It is an environment without a single incentive for local inhabitants. ‘The city’s message is: it doesn’t matter what you do with your life, because we don’t care either.’ Nonetheless, it is an environment to which the local art scene feels attracted, claims Jacque. ‘I came to Detroit because it has a good art school, with the idea of going to New York afterwards. But I stayed, because I feel I can make a difference here. I see that feeling in almost all the artists I know.’How did things get so bad? There are countless moments in the more than 100 years of Detroit’s history of which one could say, ‘Here, this is where the city took its fatal turn.’ The race riots, for example, in 1967, or back in 1943. But according to Detroit native Paul Clemens, author of Made in Detroit, the real change took place in 1972, when the world-famous recording label, Motown Records, moved from Detroit to Hollywood. That event – when Motown left Motown – was the root of the semantic confusion that would henceforth hold Detroit in its grip. If Motown was no longer Motown, what was it? People were leaving the city so quickly that there was no time to even ask the question, let alone formulate an answer. In 1950, the city’s population was at a peak of 2 million residents. In 1970, there were still 1.5 million left. By 1990, the population had shrunk to just over a million. Today, it is just under 900,000. The million mark will never be reached again.The Detroit exodus is known as the ‘white flight’, because it was primarily whites who traded downtown Detroit for the suburbs after the race riots of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, 85% of the downtown and inner-city population is coloured. With the disappearance of the white inhabitants also went the more well-to-do and better educated segments of the population, with the result that the city took in ever-decreasing tax revenues, and had to cope with ever greater problems with fewer and fewer resources. To cite just one such problem, Detroit has for decades consistently held the unenviable position of being one of the top three most violent cities in the United States.The Detroit Demolition Disneyland artists are aware that Detroit’s deep-rooted problems cannot be resolved by a few works of art. ‘But you can open up a conversation with art,’ says Jacque. ‘In this case, you force the city to do something it should have done long ago, which is tear down the buildings. And the beauty of this project is that everybody has something to say about it. Someone recently asked, “Hey, are you here to chase away the gangs?” And he was right. You can chase out gangs with orange paint.’ Social dialogue is not DDD’s only concern. ‘Those orange ruins are just beautiful, in the aesthetic sense. They are serious works of art, best described as site-specific sculpture. We give them names for a reason – the Bunker, the Triple, The House That Used To Not Be There. As an artist, you are always looking for material, and this is how we have come to see the abandoned houses. Chronologically, it began as an artistic experiment and expanded into a socially engaged project.’

Detroit As a Cultural Village

Detroit artist Tyree Guyton sees a wider role for art in his city. Guyton is the man behind the Heidelberg Project, named after the street in East Detroit where he grew up, and since 1986, where he has been using his art project to try to change the street’s image. ‘This has been a really bad neighbourhood ever since I was born, in 1955. It just got worse after the 1967 race riots, although I would rather call it an uprising/a rebellion. In the middle of all this misery, I would like to see at least one attractive city block, where every house has a purpose of its own. The Heidelberg Project has to become a cultural village, with a House of Words, a House of Music, a House of the Life, and so on, a blueprint for urban development.’Guyton’s approach differs from that of DDD in the sense that he does not want to tear down abandoned homes, but give them a function. His aesthetic and his method are also very different. Guyton uses every colour of the rainbow, painting polka dots on the houses, on the asphalt of Heidelberg Street and on his sculptures constructed from junk. His polka dots stand for life. According to Guyton, ‘Those dots are circles, and circles symbolize the endlessness of life – and life never stands still. It is always changing. I use colour and paint to show people that they can change their environment.’In addition to the polka dots, Guyton paints crosses (‘to warn the gangs to stay out of the neighbourhood’) and masks (‘to give God a face’) on everything. Paint is not his only material. Guyton adores junk. He has hung a tree on Heidelberg Street completely full of shoes found in the street. He prefers to paint his masks on old car doors that he finds at junkyards. He enlists the help of people in the neighbourhood for his projects, preferably children. ‘They are often already dealing drugs at eight or nine years old. I put a brush or a broom in their hand. They love it. And they learn that life isn’t just about money, but also about beauty.’ Whatever you think of it, it is a fact that Guyton’s work has always generated a intense reactions. Since the 1980s, there has been a deluge of complaints from neighbourhood residents, varying from, ‘Our neighbourhood is not a junk heap,’ to ‘Art belongs in the museum, not in the street.’ Sometimes the complaints are listened to. On two occasions, ‘for reasons of safety’ (some buildings were purportedly at the point of caving in), the city authorities resorted to bulldozers and helicopters to completely flatten a section of the Heidelberg Project. Only in the last few years has the relationship with the city of Detroit improved, but according to Guyton, this is only because the Project Heidelberg has become Detroit’s third most important tourist attraction – after the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum. So far, his work has not been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit (MOCAD), which opened in October, 2006. Marsha Miro is director of the new museum. ‘MOCAD has to be accessible to people in the neighbourhood. We want to engage in a dialogue with them. For that reason, we don’t charge entrance.’ MOCAD needs to be a meeting place for Detroiters. ‘The people who still live here are people who really care about this city. Those who have stayed behind – far outside the American mainstream – have developed a culture that is very attractive to artists, at least for artists who appreciate a postindustrial environment. Personally, I think Detroit is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.’ The building on Woodward Avenue where MOCAD is housed, a former showroom for a Dodge dealership, certainly qualifies as postindustrial. The floor of the main gallery still bears the tiles over which the giant Dodges of the 1970s rolled out. The remaining floors are bare cement. The walls are brick. ‘I love this building, because it is a reminder of our recent history.’ MOCAD not only provides space for local artists: on the contrary. ‘They find their way to the local galleries, but we are always looking for work that in one way or another has extra relevance for Detroit, such as that of Kara Walker, an artist who is not afraid to deal with a subject as controversial as racism.’The arrival of the Shrinking Cities exhibition at MOCAD certainly fits the bill. ‘We are exhibiting work by about 20 artists, each of whom is interpreting the problems of shrinking cities such as Detroit in their own way.’ Miro wants to emphasize one thing: ‘We are not apostles for social change. We are a museum that shows art and ideas. But we do find social engagement important. It could be no other way in a city like Detroit.’Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID)www.thecaid.orgMuseum of Contemporary Art in Detroit (MOCAD)www.mocadetroit.orgDetroit Institute of Arts (DIA)www.dia.orgShrinking Cities (Halle/Leipzig, Manchester/Liverpool and Ivanova, Russia) through April 1st; summer 2007 in Liverpool; autumn 2007 Saarbrücken, Dortmund and Frankfurt. See www.shrinkingcities.com.