Landscape as Weapon by John Beck

Author:John Beck [Beck, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781789143058
Google: kVtLzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2021-01-22T22:16:29+00:00

Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead in front of Michigan Central Station in Detroit.

The volume of ruin porn photographs of Detroit turned the city into an empty symbol of destructive capitalism but did little to address the causes of urban decay and the poverty and homelessness that accompany it. Berlin-based American artist Bryan Mendoza became a target of criticism when in 2016 he bought a derelict Detroit house and had it dismantled and shipped to Rotterdam where it was rebuilt for an art fair. Mendoza claims that he was unprepared for the political storm he stirred up in Detroit, where the project was interpreted as a predatory move that took advantage of the economic situation in the city. He knew enough, however, to take on another house, presented to him by Rhea McCauley, the niece of Civil Rights hero Rosa Parks, who had bought Parks’s old house in Detroit for $500 to save it from demolition. Mendoza packed up the house and reassembled it outside his studio in Berlin. The house was returned to the U.S. in 2018, where it was installed at the WaterFire Arts Center in Providence, Rhode Island, before being auctioned with a minimum bid of $1 million. At the time of writing, negotiations are ongoing among a pair of Detroit businessmen, a university and a foundation. Whoever finally owns the Rosa Parks house, it is unlikely to be destroyed.

The vague boosterism of Miro’s account of the Kelley project suggests that Mobile Homestead could end up simply adding to the cultural capital of Detroit as America’s ruin theme park. There is, in the end, no outside of the ruin, since dereliction is always both evidence of abandonment and an invitation for revenue generation. As Edensor claims, though, the ruin can be an opening, a gap or rupture in the seamless management of urban space by capital. In the interim, in the dead time and dead space between abandonment and reuse, the ruin might allow for challenges to ‘the imprint of power on the city’.43 The ruin is less a site than a threshold and a pause, a holding space where materialized temporalities converge. The message from the past – punk’s ‘no future’ – haunts the ruin, but it is not the foreclosure of linear time that was anticipated in the slogan and instead a denial of linearity itself.

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