Spacious Skies @ FILTER Detroit, June 2012

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS !?

On our visit to the Heidelberg project on June 3^rd 2012, during the SAIC study trip Detroit from the Ground Up, I took the picture above of one of Tyree Guyton’s characteristic ‘dot’ paintings covered in graffiti from visitors from all over the world.

Across it, at the bottom, someone has scribbled in large sprawling letters:

‘HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS!?’

I doubt this slogan originated here, in fact this bastardized version of the old truism “Home is where the heart is” is the KILROY of the art world. It pops up here and there as stickers or buttons or in bathroom stalls of squatted art spaces, and more exhibitions than I can recall bore this title. But what this anonymous graffiti artist lacked in originality (s)he made up for in poignancy, because never had this slogan looked more at home than in Detroit.

Dear Adam,

Dear Adam,

 

Remember how you always tell me how much you love Venice and how you want to go back there? And how Hong Kong is the most beautiful place you’ve ever been? And how cool it would be if we could all just go and live out on Lamma Island with the hippies, next to the Buddhist monasteries and the big nuclear power plant, and we could eat seafood and get deep tissue massages and trade in our books at the local second hand bookstore, so we would never run out of things to read, so we would not really need anything. Except sometimes, we would take the ferry over to the main island, where you can get EVERYTHING. I mean, not everything that money can buy, but all that and everything else, and yet nowhere else is so pervaded by the sense that it’s all just…it’s all just Samsara, which is a Buddhist term meaning ‘continuous flow’ or stream of consciousness, but also it means that everything is just an illusion, a figment of your imagination…

 

So, now we can begin: