Ruin porn–that much-maligned meme for artistic depictions of abandoned buildings–suffers from one intractable problem. Most of those who decry its gratuitous revelry in the abandonment of our cities also participate in it. James  Griffioen coined the term to deride those who fly into Detroit with expensive cameras to take photos they then sell for  thousands of dollars to non-Detroiters, exploiting the city for its horribly beauty while doing nothing to ameliorate or  historicize its woes. However, Griffioen’s own photographs, of empty houses covered by wild vines and shrubs also   depict decay. Rightly, he (and many others) claims that he’s different: he lives and  is invested in the city. But put his  photograph next to a supposedly x-rated piece of ruin porn, and, for the casual viewer at least, it’s all  the same kind of  shocking.

 

 

So what are rust belt artists to do? We know there is beauty in our demise. And anyway, aestheticizing the shards of the  past is nothing new: Renaissance painters were obsessed with depicting the toppled obelisks of Rome, and what was  Romanticism but nostalgia? Why should the sturdy gang of artists in our area have to censor their homegrown artistic  visions? These are questions I asked, anyway, when viewing “Pretty Vacant,” a collaborative show of work by rust belt  artists at Arts Collinwood.
It is a great title. “Pretty Vacant” references but turns the “ruin porn” canard 90 degrees: no one calls a porn star pretty,  and besides that all in the vacant landscape is not lost. Wandering through the old signs, found objects and spray painted  televisions on display in the gallery, the viewer walks on both sides of the ruin porn debate. Is the work important or  objectionable? Socially motivated or callous? In a witty piece, Greg Copeland hijacks a common vehicle for conventional  pornography: a computer screen flashes millions of online images of Michigan Central Station. The enormous Detroit  building has become the poster boy of ruin porn, and Copeland exposes our lusty, laptop-enabled desires to stare. It feels dirty.

 

 

Across the room, in his sculpture “Blight Flight,” Dana Depew has taken dozens of “Exit” signs and formed them to spell  CLE. It is a bit too head-on, but it is funny—and getting the joke binds Cleveland viewers together in a knowing laugh.  After all, we may be looking at the exit, but we stand on the gallery floor in the heart of the city. And Dave DeSimone’s  tower of televisions only get one station: static. There is more movement and imagination in the sculptures crafted  from found pieces of furniture by John Carl Close. Close is the most bootstrappy of the group. In his artist’s statement, which  he handwrote on a piece of cardboard, Close explains that he never dismantles furniture people are using, only that  which he finds. He laments that it is getting harder to find examples of fine workmanship and materials these days.  (Apparently the scavengers of ruin have been busy.) But Close’s own work pays homage to and uses the skills and  materials of those now unemployed workers. There is nothing glitzy or amusing in these pieces: his work is gritty and – without irony–rooted in place. Close defines street cred.
In his artist statement, Close writes that he lives out of his car. Imagining him tinkering with scraps of metal and wood  and glass in the back seat set me to wondering this: what if the way out of the ruin porn conundrum is to disambiguate  object from subject? What if we shifted our discussion toward how artists produce work and away from the topics they  portray? The objects of ruin porn are places and things, like Michigan Central Station or exit signs. The subjects are five rust belt artists who live and work in the region.
Right now, the subjects inhabit the objects. Think about it: 78th Street Studios. Zygote Press. Tower Press. What are  these but once abandoned buildings, rehabilitated as shelters for artists? And our artists, we keep hearing, are hubs for  economic growth and change. Can it be ruin porn if the art is produced in pretty places that once were vacant? The  troubling whiff of identity politics—if you live in the rust belt you are the good guy; if you are live elsewhere you are the problem—floats away if we shift out attention toward the making of art, and away from the consumption of it. And at this point, we have all seen Michigan Central Station enough.

 

 

This is not to say locally-grown art should not show us what we see when we drive along Carnegie, looking up at broken  windows, or when another “For Sale” sign goes up (Depew uses several Realty One signs in his piece, “Crashcourse in  Civic Pride,” which also contains a 1976 Plain Dealer story called “When Cleveland Meant Hope”). Depict what you know.  But when we think about “Cleveland art” or “rust belt aesthetics,” it might be salutary to focus on what happens in the  newly rehabilitated spaces where art is being made. There, people gather, close together, warm and intact. There we still  find lots of good material. Inside there we find capital, and most of it is human.

 

Anne Trubek is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic.