'Detroit Disassembled'

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'Detroit Disassembled': Startling photos of the Motor City at the Grand Rapids Art Museum

Published: Wednesday, June 20, 2012

By Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk | jkaczmarczyk@mlive.com The Grand Rapids Press

"National Time clock, former Cass Technical High School building," illustrates what has become of a once occupied building, now abandoned, in Detroit.

Detroit Disassembled gallery (3 photos)

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Diana Ross, Lily Tomlin and Jack White of White Stripes went to school at Cass Tech in Detroit.

Henry Ford, in his office in Highland Park, made decisions that would change forever how Americans would travel from place to place.

Both buildings today are urban and industrial ruins.

Photographer Andrew Moore captured the decline of such iconic buildings as in an exhibition titled “Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore.”

The 30 images, now on display at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, are startling.

“I hope it’s not too disturbing. That wasn’t my purpose,” Moore said. “For better or worse, it’s something that we shouldn’t look away from.”

“Detroit Disassembled” is on display as part of the museum’s summer-long “Cities in Transition” exhibition.

Moore will be in town Thursday at the Grand Rapids Art Museum to discuss the transformation of Detroit and sign copies of his book, "Detroit Disassembled."

No American city has seen more transition than the Motor City.

Once the “Arsenal of Democracy,” Detroit’s population has fallen in half, and vast expanses of urban prairie.

Alone among the great American cities, Detroit was a one-industry town that rose spectacularly and declined just as quickly.

“It’s a city that grew up very quickly,” he said. “So it’s not surprising it declined so quickly.
Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, designed by the architects who designed New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, opened in 1913 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

In 1988, the last train left the station. Today, the abandoned building spanning 14 acres is occupied by the homeless, and its dilapidated grandeur has appeared in films such as “8 Mile” starring Detroit’s own Eminem.

“I didn’t want to photograph buildings,” Moore said. “The stories that the buildings told were compelling.”

Moore spent 3-4 months over two years in 2008 and 2009 photographing the urban landscape.

Friends got him into places such as Ford Motor’s Rouge River Plant and Highland Park Plant.

“Those places are just incredible monuments to American history,” he said.

In Henry Ford’s office, the original wool carpet had just been left there, and it decayed into organic material. It’s an astonishing site.”

But looking for ruins wasn’t his objective.

“I was looking for metaphors that were lyrical and poetic,” he said. “And not just the decline of a city.”

Cass Technical High School, once a school for exceptional students in the Detroit Public Schools, was one of a number of schools closed and abandoned as it was.

“In many cases they would just leave the schools. They wouldn’t take out the desks or the art supplies or even the computers,” he said. “It was just stupefying and horrifying to see that. In other places like Cuba I’ve been in, that would never happen. Nothing is wasted, everything is repurposed.”

But in many places, nature has slowly reclaimed the man-made structures. In the Detroit Public School Depository, the skylight collapsed, and trees began growing, taking root in abandoned books, four floors above ground.

“Instead of making books out of trees, trees were growing out of rotting books,” he said. “It’s beautiful and horrifying at the same time. To an artist, that kind of contradiction is a very rich and emotional story.”

“Detroit Disassembled” first was shown at the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, another industrial city in transition, which saw the show as a cautionary tale.

“That’s absolutely how they took it – what Akron could have been or what it could have been,” he said.

The show also has been seen in Queens Museum of Art in New York City and now in Grand Rapids. Moore doubts it'll ever be seen in Detroit.

“I think Detroit is treating the whole subject of its physical decline of its city much more gingerly,” he said. “It’s hard to confront the topic directly.”

”Cities in Transition”
When : Now through Aug. 26
Where: Grand Rapids Art Museum, 101 Monroe Center
Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Thurs., 10 a.m. - 9 p.m. Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., noon-5 p.m. Sun. Closed Mondays.
Call: GRAM at 616-831-1000

”Making History: An Evening with Andrew Moore”
When: 7 p.m. Thursday (Doors open at 6 p.m., book signing at 6:30 p.m.)
Where: Grand Rapids Art Museum, 101 Monroe Center
Admission: $5; Free to museum members.
Call: GRAM at 616-831-1000

E-mail Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk: jkaczmarczyk@mlive.com
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