[Previous entry: "Imaginary Maps"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Dragonmead"]

07/26/2005 Archived Entry: "Talking Shops"

Talking Shops
David Clements Talking Shops: Detroit Commercial Folk Art is a nice collection of the wonderful art that adorns many of the city's walls and storefronts. These paintings are markings of Detroit's imaginary (figures, places, ideas, pride, consumerism, etc.). Engaging with them (as pedestrian, photographer, gawker, tourist) is itself, too, the imaginary gesture. The engagement, the event/encounter, generates the meaning.
This book serves, then, as a sort of tour guide of the imaginary, a street map to find and locate those signs of place which allude us daily (the presence of place that you have to pay attention to as you walk or drive by). I read through the pictures and I want to go to the site, to see if the art is still there. Or, like the "We The People Press" painting on an abandoned building towards the end of Jefferson, I already know that the artwork is long gone; I remember being on that street but a week or so ago, and I remember seeing only a white wall. Some of this is dependent on regret (for so long I meant to take a picture of the “gourmet food” logo on a party store on Livernois. I waited too long. The logo has been painted over). Some of this activity is dependent on romanticism (oh, how lovely). Some on invention (what do I make of these signs/paintings?).
Two spots draw my immediate attention: The Blacktronic Science mural at Mack and Drexel and the rich Eastside Check Cashing mural at E. McNichols. I don't want to know yet that these murals are gone. I want to go there and see if they are gone and what, if anything, has taken their place. That action is a part of the city-imaginary rhetoric vital to digital culture: engagement.