I’ve never spent time in Detroit, but I’ve seen an awful lot of images of the city in the last several years. And those images have been pretty awful, offering a version of the place defined by abandonment and decline. “Ruins porn,” as it’s been called, undermines even hopeful tales of creative renewal. The idea that artists can treat the city like a canvas ends up suggesting that it is a lost cause, an entire metropolitan area written off as raw material for upcycling. The net effect is a part of America depicted as if it exists in some distant reality — somebody else’s problem, nothing to do with us.
An exception to this caught my eye recently, precisely because it seemed to send a different sort of signal. Mitch Cope, an artist, and Gina Reichert, an architect, collaborate under the name Design 99, and their most recent creations form a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, with the counterintuitive title “Too Much of a Good Thing.” Among the works are sculpture security systems, which are a colorful and creative alternative to the standard plywood sheets used to fortify abandoned houses against intruders. Dubbed Razzle Dazzle devices, each takes the form of a pointy cone that’s jammed into a window or door space and is painted with a colorful pattern that injects a burst of life and energy onto vacant structures that tend to lack both. This isn’t utopian-future optimism but a kind of joyful celebration right in the midst of challenging reality. More to the point: In the lingering hangover of the real estate bust, unoccupied housing has become a much more familiar feature of neighborhoods, urban and suburban, that is hardly limited to Detroit.
Cope explains that the name Razzle Dazzle refers to a World War II naval strategy of painting ships in loud patterns that made them harder to gauge with range finders. Similarly the “bizarre” structural sculptures aren’t meant to trick trespassers so much as to confuse them. “Anything too funky or arty, they tend to avoid,” Cope says.
Design 99’s work echoes the exuberance of the Heidelberg Project, but the Razzle Dazzle devices could easily be replicated elsewhere. Cope muses about making plans available online (they’re a bit more complicated than they look), but the real power of the objects isn’t so much in duplication as in inspiration: here is something new, practical and aesthetically pleasing that could start a conversation about the visual language of unused property — not just in one city but all over the place.
1 year ago • Notes