Presenting Absence: Aesthetic Contestations of Racial Capitalism in Contemporary Detroit

CSCL invites you to join us for a colloquium with Professor Matthew Noble-Olson (University of Michigan), with Respondent Professor Charlie Kronengold (CSCL, University of Minnesota). Registration only required to view on Zoom.

Abstract:

Detroit is often depicted as abandoned. Although this type of imagery is less prominent than at the height of what used to be derisively termed "ruin porn," and the recent uneven redevelopment of Detroit has produced spaces of contestation throughout the city, there is an abiding usage of absence in artistic engagements with Detroit, including figures as diverse as Tyree Guyton, Mike Kelley, Olayami Dabls, and Julie Reyes Taubman. This talk will track the use of absence in artistic engagements with Detroit by historicizing those works produced prior to the city's bankruptcy and those works produced in its wake. I will pay particular attention to how absence is used in the work of two artists working after the bankruptcy to portray the intertwined historical realities of whiteness, finance, and climate change in the contradictions of contemporary Detroit. First, I will consider dream hampton’s film Freshwater, an experimental short that considers the geographic specificity of Detroit’s absences in the age of climate catastrophe. Freshwater focuses on the aftermath of a set of severe storms during the summer of 2020 that devastated much of Detroit, flooding both interstates and innumerable basements. This event is used to interweave considerations of racial and economic inequality in the region, the specific possibilities and dangers inherent in Detroit’s proximity to water, and the historical memory that inhabits the absent spaces that have become such a hallmark of the representation of the city. Second, I will discuss Doug Aitken’s Mirage Detroit, which was a site-specific installation of a single-family home covered entirely in mirrors and sited in the former State Savings Bank in downtown Detroit. While hampton considers the historical memory that occupies the spatial absences left by white flight and the possibilities presented by those absences in the era of climate catastrophe, Aitken figures the operations of finance capital as an abstraction of the home (the foundation of much middle-class African American wealth in Detroit that was destroyed in the 2008 financial crisis and then again in the 2020 storms). In these works, whiteness, finance, and climate change are understood as ethereal and invisible, but not absent. Rather, their effect is understood as producing absence and abandonment while remaining abstract and unseen. 

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