Cover of Warren-Forest SUN by Gary Grimshaw

A Secret History of Detroit’s First Avant-Garde
FORWARD: THE NEIGHBORHOOD, A SENSE OF PLACE

By Cary Loren

(Ed. Note: this paper is an excerpt of an anthology Cary Loren is preparing, based on interviews and discussions with people who were part of the Workshop era. When complete, he thinks he will have about twenty or so chapters of material ready for publication....)

     Collaborations with other art collectives, poetry schools and musicians makes the Workshop a dynamic area of cultural study. Connections between the Artists’ Workshop and the Black Arts movement in Harlem, the Once Group in Ann Arbor, The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, and the Black Mountain college in North Carolina, helped to spread public awareness of the new arts, poetry, and modernist jazz movements in Detroit and beyond. These connections flowed within small poetry journals, underground newspapers, word-of-mouth, tape recordings, and radio.

     This was Detroit’s first avant-garde. A network created by urban people, operating with home-grown technology. The internet’s world- wide-web presents a ghostly shadow to the actions practiced by the Workshop. However the web leaves out the essential ingredient of groups coming together and forming creative organic collectives in the urban environment. The Workshop was a living entity.

     Both anarchy and discipline were welded together in the Workshop. The group’s energy came from a belief in the city, a neighborhood and cultural center that surrounds Wayne State University and gives meaning to this sense of place called Detroit. The Workshop put ideas about artistic freedom into action, in a space that encouraged self-expression and experiment. It was not only demanding physical and mental work, but loving work. Hand typing stencils, cross country trips to gain interviews, contacts and records, collating and distributing poetry books and anthologies by hand, everything done in the name of art with little or no outside recognition. There was a total devotion and discipline to the newness of it, the recognition and satisfaction of doing-it- yourself. In the sixties the popular phrase was to “dig yourself” -- the individual serving the community was an almost sacred notion.

     The Artists Workshop produced free jazz concerts and poetry readings every Sunday afternoon. Workshop members worked in a state of innocence and compassion, learning by doing. Being influenced by Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” and the NEW AMERICAN POETRY anthology; they sensed the comradeship and ideals of a “national community of artists”— these open community “rap sessions” and poetry discussions would develop into an identifiable “Detroit School”— but that was furthest from their minds at the time. In the “Introduction to the Collected Artists Worksheets,” John Sinclair writes:

“The beautiful thing about the whole “movement” here in Detroit is that we all started equally—we were literally “nowhere,” and we have somehow been able to make a very precise place for ourselves in this city, solely through our efforts, making all the “mistakes” we had to make, taking all the chances we didn’t even know were chances…” ¹

     The Workshop had a structure that was both informal and highly organized. Membership dues were collected, concerts, readings, and exhibitions proposed and prepared. What is art anyway? The Fluxus artist Robert Fillou made the observation: “Art is a form of organized leisure.”² By using the term “workshop” in their own definition, the Detroit artists aligned themselves with a “work ethic”; that is art can also be hard work.

     Putting their principles together as a collective, the Workshop created unique dynamics within the group that fostered and spread an atmosphere of freedom and multi-leveled poetics. Making everyday life a practice of poetry and freedom was the core of Workshop activity. Fillou explains the freedom principle further in the Artistic Proposition: “In our century, everything and its opposite seems to have been said about art. On thing is certain: the great lesson modern art implies is freedom... the “Star system“ is the enemy... the distinction between learning and teaching must disappear. Being, doing and making are much more useful concepts. Art is a process.” ³

     The work of “Workshop”-- expressed a desire to integrate art into daily life.To mold, create, and display. To elevate work: (i.e.; poetry, art, music) to the level of a divine calling. WORK became the title for a series of anthology collections of Workshop poetry, prose and reviews. Work is culture.

     The urban neighborhood offered something the spotless suburban landscape lacked: soul and togetherness. The Workshop brought meaning to the community. A local “hang out” where members could stretch out their experimentation in jazz, rock and the visual arts. The Workshop practiced their art as daily life, as education within their own Free University. The Workshop affected ideals of the do-it-yourself aesthetic, before these words had common currency. Many Workshop projects and ideas have had global influence, and this do-it-yourself revolution is still evident and alive in the underground arts of today.

     Although Detroit has come forward, with worldwide recognition for its Motown, Rap, and Garage-rock music, there are still many problems it faces. “More than 33,000 young adults ages 25-34 left Metro Detroit between 2000 and 2002, according to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report. It was the biggest loss of that age group in the country, an exodus that could put the area's long-term economic outlook at risk.”⁴ Young people do not see a future in this city. One of the solutions brought up at the “Digital Drive” high-tech conference held Oct., 2003, in Dearborn, Michigan, was to create “cool cities” and to aid in this hip transformation, Governor Jennifer Granholm sent over 200 letters to Michigan mayors encouraging them to put together “cool commissions” to address the problem of keeping youth in the area. The drive to raise “cool cities” will not come from more Starbuck coffee bars, wider sidewalks or better dining. The beginning of change will start in the mind.

     In trying to reverse the loss of young educated life in the Detroit area, we need to acknowledge and be made aware our own accomplishments and strengths. Ignorance of the past leaves a black hole, emptiness, a hostile setting for any culture. Detroit is a highly creative arts center, with many quietly diverse and hidden talents, but its artistic history and roots have been largely left dormant and unknown. To know about ourselves we need to learn and teach our own secret history. The year 2004 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Detroit Artist Workshop-- in 1964 this was an open community of artists, poets, photographers and musicians who gathered around the urban campus of Wayne State University and made things happen. They were creative young people who valued the human-to-human contact and brought life to the first avant-garde in Detroit.

     The Workshop history tells a story about a neighborhood, and what a small group of like-minded people can do together. The Workshop was the origin and source, the bedrock of arts activity in Detroit. It’s a heritage and background that all Detroiters can proudly claim as their own. The history of the workshop has rarely been discussed openly or properly understood. Like so many things in Detroit, it has become ignored, undervalued and uncelebrated. We are not a city that is comfortable talking about itself. Let's try and change that. The Workshop anniversary is a milestone of recognition and perhaps a new beginning. A true urban renaissance celebrates not only commerce and industry, but also the arts. A city that can embrace and raise the consciousness of its artistic success and heritage is a city that has a future.

     The most important worldwide avant-garde movements have sprung out of urban neighborhoods. Montparnese, Paris in the 1890s was one of the first and best known, setting a pattern that would follow with Dadaism in Zurich, Berlin and New York by 1917. Breton’s surrealist vision grew out Paris in the 1920s. In the 1950s and early 60s, the Greenwich Village area in New York, and North Beach in San Francisco were  modernist centers of abstract expressionism, pop-art, Fluxus and beat literature. The most successful art communities are those which were able to put their shared vision into action. All were urban neighborhoods which gave structure and support to the arts.

 

     The Detroit scene absorbed tenets of the past, but quickly developed its own highly organized and unique practices. It’s interesting that the Workshop put education at the top of its priorities. Springing out of the campus of Wayne State is one explanation.  Throughout this collection, we will explore some of the facets and ideas put into action which help define Detroit’s first avant-garde, the Detroit Artists Workshop.

     For more information on the original location of the Detroit Artists Workshop, see: Introduction to the Artists Workshop Press.  Top

____________

¹ John Sinclair, editor of THE COLLECTED ARTISTS WORKSHEET, (Detroit Artists workshop Press, 1965)

² Robert Fillou, Teaching and Learning as Performance Arts, (Verlag Gebr. Koln, New York, 1970) p. 23.

³ Robert Fillou, p. 24 ibid.

⁴ The Detroit News, 10/09/03 Christopher M. Singer, “Cool cities may defy planning”

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