MOCAD, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit, is located on 4454 Woodward Avenue. Until mid July the MOCAD shows Jef Geys' ‘Woodward Avenue', an intricate variation on his ‘Quadra Medicinale' which the artist presented at the Belgian Pavillion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. The director of the MOCAD, Luis Croquer, explains the title of the work and tells of his meeting with the Belgian artist.

My earliest experiences in Detroit were deeply marked by my travels up and down Woodward Avenue. The road is central to the city's transportation system and the obligatory passage (outside of freeways) to the northern suburbs. What is striking about the Avenue is its insistent linearity, its egotistical width that highlights the importance of car over person, and its symbolic status as both an outmoded model of modernization and as the potential nucleus (with proposed alterations) of nascent efforts for the city's renewal.
Woodward, as everyone calls it in Detroit, is today also a major American thoroughfare with a double-life, one that is lived in two cities. One that is poorer, on the brink of collapse and in a state of rural-urbanism, but still is unique and striking; the other, located north of Eight Mile Road, is wealthier, busier, and although clearly more developed and manicured, it is a more generic and even unremarkable example of suburban life in the heartland.
The aging City, formerly known as the ‘Paris of the Midwest', was the concentrated site of profound innovation, wealth and transformation so powerful, in fact, that it changed the world with its inventions and new business models. Henry Ford's adoption of the assembly line not only helped to expedite the manufacturing of automobiles, but also managed to influence all modern processes of production.
Detroit was, from the beginning of the twentieth century and until the nineteen fifties, a major player in national and international affairs; a business center, but also an architectural, artistic and musical capital in the United States. The skyscrapers, factories and art institutions of that era are a testament to that wealth. Their sheer size and majestic presence still speaks, with melancholy, of an implicit belief that modernization was unequivocally linear and, more importantly, an unstoppable process.

GRANDE DAME

Woodward, in its downtown portion, was at that time a thriving shopping center, an equivalent of New York's Fifth Avenue and most definitely the Grande Dame of Detroit's avenues. The street was graced on both sides with important buildings and institutions so worthy of note that they were often immortalized in postcards like the one pictured below found by Dr. Lorry Swerts - compatriot, collaborator and friend of Jef Geys, and honored guest of our project - in his Grandmother's albums.
But success and power, or better yet, force, are a double-edged sword. At best they generate increased responsibility and harmonious growth, and at worst abuse of power and autocracy. The Fordist ethos was not only a business model, but also a social experiment; one that had specific rules, created unthinkable individual wealth and that when combined with diverse social and political forces, helped engender challenges and deep schisms that changed the city forever.
In the last four decades, Detroit was practically abandoned and forgotten, becoming an island where modernization and growth almost literally stopped, and where jump starts to revive the city often failed. These changes have resulted in an increasing shrinkage of its population, a profusion of survival strategies borne out of necessity, and the spontaneous occurrence of many creative initiatives that lie in the interstices of legality and illegality.
The Detroit we see now is still beautiful, weirdly innovative and very resilient. What some deem a failure is, in fact, another stage of development; a new frontier where models are ‘de facto' being revised and where an apparent end - based on old narratives - is perhaps a new beginning, one that is still being shaped.

PROCESS

When I met Jef Geys for the first time at his home in Balen, Belgium, I had the first taste of his work process. In art, we often speak of process as a set of purely conceptual or material concerns that are removed from life, rationalized and operated to alter reality. Geys' process is conceptual in part, but also very real and organic. It is based on social interactions, trust, collaboration, mentoring and respect for other disciplines.
We spent the first hour of my visit seeing his garden, his home, meeting his wife and talking, simply talking. Here was an artist exercising his right to choose a project, a site of intervention and a potential partnership. At an undetermined point, he invited me to his studio and there suddenly Woodward Avenue appeared in Balen, carefully studied, mapped and caringly dissected. Geys asked me questions about specific intersections that I had never even seen, let alone visited.
With the aid of technology he has visited these sites time and time again, studied them, selected them, and figured out a plan for a project that was, from the onset, both extremely clear, and also open to chance.
‘Woodward Avenue' is both an expansion and a departure from his ‘Quadra Medicinale' project, the interdisciplinary exhibition that he presented at the Belgian Pavillion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Both ‘Quadra Medicinale' and ‘Woodward Avenue' have as their origin the term ‘terroir', one that suggests a biological community or habitat, rather than a territory or geographical location; and at their core, the artist's ongoing interest in simple and often overlooked phenomena.
The project in Venice focused on the cities of Villeurbanne, New York, Moscow and Brussels, where Geys asked friends to collect samples of twelve wild plants found within a one square kilometer radius (0.386 square miles) in those cities. This collection of plants resulted in an unexpected scientific inventory of ordinary and often overlooked weeds that grow under similar conditions in the margins of cities around the world and that unbeknownst to us are often edible, medicinal and even poisonous.
For the Detroit exhibition, Geys changed the methodology and asked Dr. Ina Vandebroek, a scientist and a contributor for the New York section of ‘Quadra Medicinale', to collect weeds at twelve intersections along Woodward Avenue, beginning at Cadillac Square in the heart of Detroit, and ending at Saginaw Street nearly thirty miles north in the neighboring city of Pontiac. It is significant that the delineated straight-line course crossed Eight Mile Road, the invisible but tangible border that separates the largely unpopulated downtown lush with wild plants, from the densely populated, more controlled and well-kept suburbs.
‘Woodward Avenue' includes the dried plant specimens collected at those twelve intersections with their corresponding scientific descriptions, the photographs of the street signs and plants in their original state, as well as the Google maps (as captured images and assembled collages) that the artist used to locate them.

FILMS

The exhibition also features two new films that record an ethnobotany workshop with traditional health practitioners run by Dr. Vandebroek in Eterazama, Bolivia. The raw footage was edited to the artist's precise specifications with the videos shown facing each other, essentially telling the same story, one in a short format and the other in a longer one.
These films not only link the project to yet another city, this time in South America, but also make unexpected connections to largely invisible groups of people. Namely, the local healers and patients that also use plants productively in the shadows of this city.
‘Woodward Avenue' is a multi-layered project that continues Jef Geys' fascination with documentation, science, technology, human relations and community engagement. It also faithfully encapsulates his persistent and questioning interest in the discrete but crucial role that art plays as a vehicle to obliquely highlight and address larger social issues; precisely those that most people would overlook or would prefer to ignore.
This special edition of the Kempens Informatieblad (Kempens Information Journal) accompanies the exhibition, as do other public programs and specialized scientific workshops. All of these elements are a part of and integral to this art project.

Luis CROQUER
is the director of the MOCAD

‘Woodward Avenue' by Jef Geys, till July 25th at the MOCAD, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201, mocadetroit.org