(loud scraping)
MEL CHIN: It was after a big museum show, her first museum show,
that I was in an elevator, going down and the voice says, or asks,
“Mel, what do you love more than anything in the world?”
And I said, “Well, I love to make things with my hands. I just love doing that.”
(drawing on paper)
The other voice says, “okay, stop.”
And I listened to that voice.
By stopping I was able to flow free in the world again,
not being held by some delusional idea of what it meant to be an artist.
And I felt free to listen to other voices, other ideas that were in the world.
NEWSCASTER: It happened on Detroit’s East side, the 2100 block of Springell.
You’re watching one of the most intense fires of this “Devil’s Night.”
The target—an abandoned home.
For nearly 2 ½ hours, city firefighters struggled with low water pressure and a roaring blaze.
(car motor rumbling)
CHIN: If you look at the images of burning homes in Detroit,
if that’s my recollection of it, I have to change that image of that house.
What could you do with that house? You have no electricity, no water, no money.
But you have these places decayed by fire or by abandonment.
As an artist, you go in to see what you can contribute.
That’s where the “Spawn” idea came around—
It stands for… a covert activity.
You take the internal organs of a place,
and you use it in a whole ‘nother way, rather than just reconstruction.
(creaking floorboards)
MAN: But it’s sad to see something that working and now not working.
–Can we get up the stairs this way?
–We’d be better off going up the stairs the front way. This has got a lot of trash.
CHIN: This project is about transformation on many different levels.
You’re taking what is considered of no value and of shame and says,
“No, it has value, but it has another kind of value, another life.”
Through the idea of conceptual art, we can do this.
It’s almost like kind of, reclaim it out of the fire. It’s a whole ‘nother idea.
So it’s a three-year project, maybe two-year project,
where you actually see a transformation over time.
–MAN: And the last I know, the basement was flooded.
–CHIN: Okay, so there is a basement to this? But we got to engineer it correctly.
So you can work on one half.
And the whole house can just swing aside and the basement is revealed.
Take a whole house, put it on a pivot, so the whole house can spin aside.
And underneath is all this activity in the basement of raising earthworms,
or fishing worms, Devil’s Night Crawlers that you can sell to
the large fishing population, -...in a way where it could really help
transform the vision of Detroit in a very positive way.
My contribution is twofold— to create something that can be living after I’m gone,
or I’m not a part of it so it can be returned to the neighborhood.
(sweeping broken glass)
And at the same time reclaim an icon from what it has been depicted now as.
(sweeping broken glass)
MAN: Yo, man, you think it’s going to happen today?
MAN 2: I hope so.
MAN 3: Hey, guy, Gerald’s been here all day. Is it going to happen soon?
MAN 1: Maybe.
MAN 4: What you guys doing?
MAN 2: Well, we’re just waiting for it to happen.
MAN 4: Come on, guys, you got to make it happen.
MAN 3: Here we go.
MAN 2: Gerald, you’re the hardest working man around. How is it today?
MAN: Man, I am one happy ass. Big fat worms to sort for all those rich people’s delicate roses.
MAN: Fade in to black.
CHIN: Making art, I think, is not about one track, not one method,
but the diversity of mediums and techniques is minor.
But the diversity of ideas and how they survive and the
methods they are transmitted is very important.
(ethereal music)
“Knowmad” is a video game that you sit down,
and you drive through 36 tribal carpets that were selected
based on a mapping of tribes that exist in Turkey, or Anatolia, in Iran and Afghanistan.
Tribal cultures are dying, as we know, or as we have known them,
after existing for thousands of years.
Video game culture is thriving, overtaking Hollywood in terms of how much money it brings in.
Perhaps in a video game, it can drive you into a place, a curious place,
where you might ask the question, “Where did these patterns come from?”
(throwing carpet)
(throwing second carpet)
It felt like to have the installation occur with the real tribal rugs
was a way of allowing peripheral information to float back into your head
as you would turn away from the game.
There’s a real world of rugs and people there as well.
That’s a prayer rug, so we want to make sure it’s pointing in the right direction—east.
It’s creating a layered environment.
MAN: Originally, Mel kind of gave us the concept of what to do
and the whole driving game aspect and stuff.
Only he really didn’t know what all it was going to entail. Half-way.
MAN: He gave us specific rugs that he wanted us to use,
and using software we developed sort of these abstract obstacle courses.
(inaudible speaking)
This gave us an opportunity to just sort of make these abstract,
colorful, make-believe worlds where there really was no rules
other than just sort of respect the symbolism
and the patterns in the carpet and just kind of go crazy from there.
(upbeat arabic music)
CHIN: I wanted to limit my influence. Rather than saying, “It has to be this, and this,”
I said, “Sort of see this, but you do not have to be held to that.”
Because if we’re going to make art, it should be liberating.
(inaudible cheerful speaking)
My thoughts in the objects I make or have made have been a
collection of ideas that have come from others as well.
Part of the art is creating the form for the new invention to occur.
(upbeat music and speaking)
Knowmad is a digital re-weave of patterns that have been around for thousands of years
that we may know nothing about.
But perhaps in a video game, we might have that, again,
the desire to respect what they might have been, more than just decoration.
Because they are about people.
“Revival field” is a simple sculpture that has this poetic premise.
In Michaelangelo’s days, he would have a block of marble,
and he would have an image in his mind, incredible images in his mind,
and he would take the chisel and carve away until we see something as remarkable as “David.”
(serene music)
In our contemporary times, our materials have changed.
Our materials are still marble, but they also can be…
stuff that we’ve never dreamed of using.
In this case, toxic earth.
It is the sculpturing of an ecology from one near death,
or one that is decayed or dead, into one that is living.
NARRATOR: The diversity of life has been deeply affected by industry.
The smelting of metals, such as zinc, cadmium, lead, and copper, produces particulates,
sometimes invisible to the eye, which contaminate the environment.
These metal particulates weaken and destroy many forms of life.
Long after the smelting is complete, pollution remains in the soil.
There have been no viable solutions to this problem,
until the “Revival Field'' project, which proved an existing theory.
Special plants called hyperaccumulators are introduced into the barren landscape.
The metal in the soil would kill most plants,
but the hyperaccumulators thrive, pulling the metals into their stems and shoots.
When the plants mature, they are harvested.
The plants are then burned in reclaiming furnaces.
This process yields metal purer than high-grade ore, which can be resold.
The continuation of this process cleans the soil and allows life to return to the environment.
This renewed ecology is the completion of a work of art.
CHIN: I don’t go about trying to make a science/art project or anything,
or political project. I think it has to be driven by some kind of poetry.
That poetry of plants having the capacity to transform a system was amazing enough,
and it was also driven by pragmatism.
I think you have to have both. It has a little red cast in it, at the base.
But I don’t know if that is…
In this world, there are cultures dying… and some cultures thriving.
There are soils that are dead that can be reborn with the help of a work of art.
There are neighborhoods, they tell us, that are dying… but instead they are inspiring.
We assume that we are living in a culture of consumption…
that tells us what to eat and what to dear.
But it’s not all that. Art for the 21st century is the same as it’s always been—
it is never the same.
MAN:
You know, normally I like to use artificial.
But if I’m going after that big lunker, or that ornery wall-eyed pike up here in the great lake,
I like to use the biggest, baddest worm of them all—
Devil’s Nightcrawlers, direct from Detroit City.
These worms will drive you crazy with all the fish you gonna catch.
See what I mean? Devil’s Nightcrawlers, the Motown worm.
Guaranteed to catch you mo’ fish, give you mo’ action than any worm around.
Devil’s Nightcrawlers, home-grown in East Side Detroit.