Ways of Seeing Ruins

America Through the Cracks: Part II

To mark the paperback release of At Work in the Ruins, I made a tour around parts of North America. This is the second story in a series that grew out of that journey.

Before it gets underway, let me just mention the new online series I’ll be teaching with a school called HOME, as part of our ongoing enquiry into “the work of regrowing a living culture”. Pockets, Patterns & Practices starts on 6 and 7 November. I’ll write more about it soon, but you can check out the details now on the school website – and bookings for the series have just opened.

The Stony Island Arts Bank in the South Side of Chicago.

Heading into the restrooms at Midway Airport, the signs with a tornado symbol read Severe Weather Shelter Area and I knew I was a long way from home.

I’d never been to Chicago. Nor anywhere in the Midwest, really, unless you count skimming through Missouri on the Interstate, that weekend in September 2001, when a friend and I drove from Oregon to Mississippi in two long days. “Now I’m in America,” I thought, in a way that hadn’t hit me in the New England towns where I’d spent the early days of this trip.

Ashley threw my case into the back of her old van and we were off into the vast grid of this great lakeside city. Chicago! What did I know about this place? What baggage was I coming with? It came down to three associations, I realised.

The first was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I must have watched that film twenty times as a teenager, until I knew every turn in the story. Last week, heading home to Sweden, they had it on the inflight entertainment system, so I watched it again, the way a Christian might watch a Greek tragedy: admiring the well-wrought enactment of an alien and disturbing worldview. It’s still perfectly crafted, still funny, still a paean to an impossible world in which it works for adolescents to receive initiation from their peers.¹

Remember these guys? There’s a Ferris Bueller spin-off movie in the works about their day off.

My second association was to the work of John McKnight. A civil rights organiser who learned his trade from Saul Alinsky, McKnight had the unusual distinction of being drafted into Northwestern University in the late 1960s and given a tenured professorship, despite holding no more than a bachelor’s degree, to set up a new Center for Urban Affairs.

Around the same time, he became friends with Ivan Illich, which is what would eventually put him on my map. One of McKnight’s students travelled to Cuernavaca to take part in a summer of conversations about education at the Centre for Intercultural Documentation. Several books were born out of those conversations, including Illich’s Deschooling Society, but in Chicago they had a more practical consequence. With a $20 loan from McKnight, the student started The Learning Exchange, a human library connecting anyone with a desire to learn something with someone in the community who was offering to teach it.² Many years later, when some friends and I set out to use the internet to implement the “learning webs” proposal from Deschooling Society, a fat envelope arrived at our attic offices in Bethnal Green one day containing a photocopied manual from the late 1980s which documented how the Chicago exchange had grown to thirty-thousand members, run by a couple of staff with a handful of volunteers, three phone lines and a card-file database.

McKnight and his colleagues distilled what they were learning from these projects into a methodology known as Asset-Based Community Development. At its heart is an Illichian observation: that “development” work tends to start by seeing only what is lacking, defining people and places in terms of their neediness and deprivation. What happens if, instead, you attend to what is already present within a situation, though overlooked or undervalued, or valued only by those whose voices don’t usually get to count? Maybe this way of looking will lead to a different picture of how change can come about: one which doesn’t assume that, in order for anything to happen, we need to begin by mobilising large-scale resources – public, private or philanthropic – from elsewhere. Instead, what sets change in motion might be a shift in the ways of seeing what is already present, a way of mapping which brings the hidden into view, a story which animates these elements differently.

I’ve never met McKnight, never studied the methods of ABCD in detail, but what I’ve understood of the spirit of his work infuses much of what I’ve done over the years and the way I go about it.

The third association I brought with me to Chicago was to the work of Theaster Gates, a Black artist from the South Side.

There’s an origin story of Gates’s artistic career. It involves a series of soul food dinners he held back in 2007 to honour the memory of the Japanese master potter, Shoji Yamaguchi, with whom he had trained. The food was a fusion of Japanese and African-American cuisines, served on plates made by the late master from Mississippi mud. The dinners were a continuation of the practice initiated by Yamaguchi and his wife, May, a Black civil rights activist, of convening conversations about racial and social tensions around a meal table.

Only, there was a twist: the Yamaguchis didn’t exist. They were a creation of Gates’s imagination, and by spinning this fiction around his work he went from struggling to sell his plates for $25 a time, to become a rising star in the world of fine arts.

Later in the trip, I told this story in a noisy restaurant in Manhattan and heard how it could land as though it were about the artist as manipulator, clever and cynical. Yet this is far from the picture I have of Gates. Rather, he has long struck me as an embodiment of the trickster spirit in service to something larger, something unfashionably sincere. If Picasso said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth”, then what I see in Gates is the power of the artist’s lie to tear a hole through which truth can enter.

Having cracked the code and caught sight of the way the imagination can hack the official indexes of value, he put these skills to use in his own neighbourhood, repurposing salvaged materials into artworks and using the money they sell for to turn derelict properties into cultural institutions. He is explicit about the rationale for this:

The reality in the neighbourhood that I live in is if I don’t constantly reconcile what I have against what other people don’t, either I need to leave and be around other people who have what I have, or I’m constantly engaged in this kind of dynamic flow of opportunity and sharing. And that just feels like smart living.³

The way you live forms you. There was a moment a few years ago when artists shortlisted for prizes began to issue joint statements declaring their unwillingness to be chosen between. Maybe I’m wrong, but I couldn’t help imagining the process which led to such a statement and feeling the contrast with Gates’s reaction when it was announced that he had won the Artes Mundi prize in 2015. He yelled, “Let’s split this motherfucker!” and shared out the £40,000 prize money with the other nine artists on the shortlist. It felt like a move that took no thought, a reflex flowing out of a whole way of working and inhabiting the world.

Sanctum, a temporary structure which Gates created within the ruin of Temple Church, Bristol in 2015. “For 24 days, 24 hours a day, the site was transformed into an intimate place of listening.” (Image: Max McClure)

You’ve got the picture by now, I’m a fan of Theaster Gates.

So when Ashley pulled up outside the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago campus, and when I’d checked into my room, I went online to search for where to go to see his work. Just to take a walk past the buildings on Dorchester Avenue that he had transformed would be good, I thought. But the search engine had news: that very day, Gates had a new exhibition opening to the public at the grandest of the spaces his work has revived, the Stony Island Arts Bank.

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A group of readers had come to Chicago, travelling from all directions, to gather for a weekend around my book and the places where it touched the questions each of them were carrying. We met in the wood-panelled library of the Quadrangle Club. Over two days, each member of the group took a turn to lead our conversations and take us into what was on their hearts.

At the end of the first day, I took them to the Arts Bank, a former financial institution that Gates and his collaborators saved from demolition. Two car-loads of retreat participants, travelling the mile or so due south. The new exhibition was based around the library and furnishings of the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, one of the collections of Black cultural heritage in Chicago for which Gates has taken on the role of caretaker. Near the entrance, a sign read Black Spaces Matter, and I was conscious of bringing a very white group into this space.

I was standing with Ivan who had come down from Minnesota, we’d just ordered a drink, when a man with a greying beard stepped out from behind the bar and greeted us, and I realised this was Gates himself. He was soft-spoken, humble, hospitable, making us welcome, asking what had brought us here.

“It’s my first time in Chicago,” I said, “but I’ve admired your work from afar for a long time.” When I explained that we were here for a retreat, he asked how it was going, and I deferred to Ivan.

“Oh, it’s great,” he said, “we’re talking about the work in the ruins.”

And Gates brightened.

“You know, that’s what this is,” he said. “The first time I walked in here, there was pigeon shit everywhere and you could see straight up to the sky. I could see how it was going to be, even then. I said, the bar will be here, and the library will be up there. But my friends said, nah, it’s never going to happen.”

We all looked up at the ceiling, the fragments of the original vault and the new structure behind it, where you would have seen the clouds, the library, the bar, and the exhibition all around us.

“It takes a certain way of looking to see what’s possible in ruins,” Gates said.

And a certain way of telling to set that possibility in motion, I thought, as he thanked us and moved on to take the drinks he was holding to another group of guests.

It’s strange, Theaster Gates and John McKnight were both on the reading list I made for the first course we ever held as a school called HOME. But until I found myself in Chicago, I’d never really put the two of them together, or seen how their work reaches out from different ends of this long city. Where it meets is in the example both men offer of another way of seeing, another way of telling, another way of indexing value and setting change in motion.

I took the night train from Chicago, heading east, and picked up a rental car the next morning in Buffalo. Later that week, I was driving the backroads down to State College, Pennsylvania, seeing a little more of America than you get sight of from the Interstate. Reading the signs on lawns – TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING: WAKE UP AMERICA! DICTATOR OR DEMOCRACY: THAT’S THE CHOICE! Taking in the beaten-up feel of the small places, the placeless sameness of the larger places. As I drove, I found that Gates’s words were running in my head: “It takes a certain way of looking.”

Because it struck me that America has no shortage of ruins. Once you get out beyond the islands of prosperity, it would be easy to see with the eyes through which Gates’s friends saw the wreck of the old Stony Island State Savings Bank. To say, nah, it’s never going to happen, nothing good could grow on ground like this. That would be a reasonable way to look on the ruins that are not hard to find in any of our societies, or on the fresh wreckage brought by the hurricane that just tore through North Carolina, where another of our retreat participants had travelled from.

Against evidence like that, I don’t want to offer any cheap hope. Only to say, because it’s what came to me on that drive, that a lot may depend on those other ways of seeing, unreasonable, prophetic, if we are to bring out the good that could still grow, even on the unpromising ground that lies ahead of us.

Thanks for reading, sharing and spreading the word. Before I go, another mention of the Pockets, Patterns & Practices series, a chance to lean into the questions I write about and meet others who are drawn to this work. All the details are on the school website.

DH

1. Robert Bly wrote a book called The Sibling Society about the dangers of a society organised around peer initiation. In a different key, Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté’s Hold Onto Your Kids gives a psychological and historical account of how “peer attachment” became normalised from the 1950s onwards, why this ends badly and what parents can do against this background.

2. The story of the origins of The Learning Exchange is told in this 1982 interview with McKnight.

3. From this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MslDkPsGHg