Coda

The coda to Unfinished Business begins with the election of Donald Trump as US president, presenting this as a bookend to the election of Ronald Reagan nearly four decades earlier. Racialized and racist responses to the deindustrial are as central to the Trump phenomenon as they were to the so-called Reagan Democrats. Yet Trumpist nostalgia for industrial labor ignores or misremembers these jobs’ debilitating dimensions, as stated in the 1972 federal report “Work in America.” The coda notes that Michael Jackson’s legacy as an exemplary entrepreneur has been successfully redeployed by a new generation of African American artists, and addresses the continued gestic potential of the Heidelberg Project in the wake of Tyree Guyton’s decision to remove parts of it. It concludes by asserting that, until myths of white supremacy are confronted and dismantled, no systemic attempt to redress the predations of the deindustrial can be successful.

Up from the Ashes

Chapter 4 examines Detroit as US capitalism’s putative post-industrial phoenix between 2011 and 2016: both a blank slate and an emerging comeback story. The chapter analyzes key national and local figurations of Detroit’s widely touted arts- and artist-led renaissance that kunst-wash the structural inequities and racialized austerity imperatives of some current redevelopment initiatives. Two Detroit installations, Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project and Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, challenge these kunst-washed figurations. Both works draw their potency from their status as homes in a period when homes in the city were facing threats of tax foreclosure, water shutoffs, new versions of redlining, and proposed civic abandonment. Each work is discussed in detail using Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the gest. Both installations stage core elements of the deindustrial; both challenge audiences to confront the racialization, selective debility and selective prosperity, melancholy, and uncanniness of deindustriality itself.

Turning the Neighborhood Inside Out: Imagining a New Detroit in Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project

In Detroit, an artist reclaims recent history and offers it as an everchanging, large-scale environmental performance where discarded objects—carefully presented—embody memory, anger, and hope.