(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

OK, enough gloom, let’s get it all into perspective. If you need to understand that apocalypse could still be fun then you need go no further than the Heidelberg Project in Black Bottom (seriously!), one of the famously derelict suburbs of Detroit.

(Photo retardita under CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

Strictly speaking the Heidelberg Project is not adaptive reuse, well maybe in part, but it shows why adaptive reuse may be far more important than it seems. What attracts us to adaptive reuse is that even when it is most serious it can still be play, the type of play that demonstrates how resourceful and resilient humans can be, how they can adapt and reframe a situation and how they can even make something great using the impossible raw materials left over from a disaster.

Tyree Guyton (Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

And it’s hard to think of less promising raw materials than the derelict gang ridden suburbs of Detroit. If you want to see the future, after climate change has decimated the deluded industrial nations of the world then Detroit is definitely Tomorrowland. And this is how its creator Tyree Guyton found it:

The Heidelberg Project is, in part, a political protest, as Tyree Guyton’s childhood neighborhood began to deteriorate after the 1967 riots. Following his stint in the Army, Tyree Guyton described coming back to Heidelberg Street and the surrounding neighborhood as if “a bomb went off”.

At first, the project consisted of a series of houses on Detroit’s Heidelberg Street, painted with bright dots of many colors in conjunction with salvaged items being attached to the houses. It was a constantly evolving work that transformed a hard-core inner city neighborhood where people were afraid to walk, even in daytime, into one in which neighbors took pride and where visitors were many and welcomed.

Tyree Guyton worked on The Heidelberg Project every day with the children on the block. He and director, Jenenne Whitfield, gave lectures and workshops around the country. Their main goal was to develop The Heidelberg Project into the city’s first indoor and outdoor museum; complete with an artist colony, creative art center, community garden, amphitheater, and more.

Now, it has over 250,000 visitors a year and is one of Detroit’s major tourist attractions, despite City Hall expressing its disapproval by partial demolition (talk about declutter!).

Guyton says about his work

“I like to take that which is dead (cast aside, thrown away) and put life back in it by adding colors and shapes and making it speak back to the world.”

What’s not to love about it?

(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

The dot house…

(Photo retardita under CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

the animal house…

(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

Cinderella’s warholian slippers…

(Photo technochick under CC-BY-SA licence)

the wonderful sorcerer’s apprentice parody of the marching vacuum cleaners…

(Photo retardita under CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

the art gallery…

(Photo laughlin under CC-BY licence)

sculpture whose precariousness would put Richard Serra’s to shame…

(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

or the memorial to Rosa Parks? It’s all proof that no matter what happens, humans will still somehow manage to be happy if they are working together and creating. Have a happy Chocolate Festival!

And their highlighted project right now is an adaptively reused 500cc PET plastic bottle used as a spacer for asthma medications. How appropriate!

… who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.

But for this definition to make sense there must also be this thing called high culture,

The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

In other words, kitsch is high culture (or at least its mannerisms) adaptively reused to profitably entertain rather than enlighten the unwashed masses.

(Nymph by J H Lynch)

To qualify as high culture a work must embody self referential values to be found only in art, values lost on the vulgar masses but universally recognisable by the educated and the perceptive … and it’s here that Greenberg, at this point in his life ostensibly a marxist, gives the game away. Suddenly the holy trinity of wealth, power and art are brought together into an eternal truth, proof that the ruling class really is superior, while kitsch is a sign that the inferior masses deserve crap…..

There has always been on one side the minority of the powerful — and therefore the cultivated — and on the other the great mass of the exploited and poor — and therefore the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.

Well, what a topsy turvy old world we now live in. This eternal truth of ruling class ideology has been shattered once and for all by the esteemed bagmaker Louis Vuitton who have just produced a masterpiece of kitsch surpassing all others, and they’ve done it by the exact process that Greenberg describes. They have taken the make do bricollage and adaptive reuse that has been the hallmark of working class street fashion and outsider fashion for a century or more, codified it, rendered it meaningless and exploited it. As Greenberg put it, they have borrowed street culture’s “devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, convert[ed] them into a system, and discard[ed] the rest. ”

Yes, it’s the Louis Vuitton Tribute Patchwork bag, the most expensive handbag in the world (US$42,000 in a limited edition of 24)

made in two different versions by sewing together twenty or more of the other most expensive handbags in the world

in a bizarre parody of the now familiar adaptive reuse patchwork style. Who said you can’t carry more than one handbag at a time? Even the hilarious fashion victim site Bagsnob was agog with horror at its sheer vulgarity. And of course it was almost immediately faked!

Greenberg has been debunked for thirty years or more and his ravings generally recognised as little more than ideology dressed up as art criticism (although many in the art world still identify with his sense of self appointed superiority and even occasionally try to revive the mummified corpse of his sociopathic formalist aesthetics). The release of this handbag may be a monumentally trivial event but it is just one more small proof of how often he was wrong. Class condescension is essential to the concept of kitsch and if kitsch is universal then it’s a meaningless term.

This may seem an irrelevant thing to be commenting on until you think of the implications. Ruling class ideology in every era aims to emphasise and legitimise the the power of those at the top while undermining the power and initiative and creativity of those at the bottom - the concept of kitsch is an illustration of how items that could best be described as simply derivative in design and shoddy in manufacture,

(Crying boy by Bragolin)

and that should reflect badly on their manufacturer instead become markers and enforcers of low status in the viewer.

Repeatedly in our world we see that great ideas in fact come from everywhere but more of them come from below because there are more people down there, writing open source software, rehearsing their bands in their garage, making stencils and graffiti, inventing, you name it. That’s why it’s far more likely that most of the solutions to our climate change disaster will come from cultural innovation at the bottom, they will be small scale and distributed, not large scale and centralised, and they will involve endless personal epiphanies and tiny adaptive creativities.

Meanwhile, most of the resistance to reform will come from Greenberg’s supposedly superior “minority of the powerful and cultivated” who will defend climate destruction to the point of criminality because they benefit from it and then they will try to impose large scale top down “solutions” (eg “clean” coal and nuclear) that maintain or even increase the power of the socio-economic memes that got us into this mess.

This bag should stand as permanent reminder of how clueless, vulgar and basically unworthy many of the “powerful and cultivated” really are.

Maybe just a rubber band?

Or perhaps made of duct tape?

You can even make one lined with aluminum foil to go with your tin foil helmet?

Sorry, shouldn’t joke, RFID devices are a problem - but while you’re at it you could also make a Marvin the Martian costume out of duct tape.

That’s what we like about DIY adaptive reuse, you have a choice between different things rather than the average consumer’s stressful tyranny of choice between the same things.

Let’s be even more critical than usual. This stuff is just plain bloody awful. Since we are not interested in shaming we won’t even tell you where it comes from,

the point is that it is indicative of something that seems to be increasing, fake adaptive reuse, a sort of greener shabby chic.

It tries to look like adaptive reuse but it uses brand new materials, presumably because it would sully the sterility of the bourgeouis environment to actually use grubby old materials. You get to look cool and environmentally aware without giving up your wealthy consumer status.

It’s the perfect illustration of how consumerism can poison its opposition by turning the opposition into a product. Marcuse described it long ago.

So you’re down at the butchers buying a steak or two, a few sausages, then you whip off your bra and pop them inside. It’s gotta be worth a discount?

That’s how adaptive reuse can be economically viable. Yes (or No!), it’s the bra that can be adaptively reused as a shopping bag, known unsurprisingly as the “No! Shopping Bag Bra” (NO! reji-bukuro bra). This environment friendly lingerie is designed to promote the reduction of plastic bag consumption. (from Triumph International Japan via Pink Tentacle)

When they tried to reduce plastic bag use in Australia the occasional International Klein Blue bag was as sexy as it got. The Japanese may be on to something here. Given that sex is already used to sell everything else, why not sustainability? Or are they using sustainability to sell bras?

We commented recently about the growing incidence of products that facilitate the adaptive reuse of other products. Here is the latest, a bottle stool (found on treehugger).

The Footstool by StudioHelsinki uses pet bottles as the base of a go-anywhere stool.

Neat, although not as neat as the more expensive traditional shooting stick, just the thing for our Orwellian age.

Decorate your tree with adaptively reused circuit boards, then buy presents

like this American Gulag bracelet from richterstudios inc,

or wineglasses from the Eden Project store

or a paper pot maker

or a personal solar panel

or a Rockbox open source mp3 player (photo by Andrew Mason).

or a MAKE warranty voider (go on, you know you want one) or any number of other geeky goodies from The Open Source Gift Guide or good gifts from the Good Gifts Catalogue.

Wrap them with last year’s reused wrapping paper (that always feels so pov but hey, Christmas is a stupid idea anyway), or check out some equally pov ideas from curbly

then set your fruit clock and if you’ve been a good primate all year (I have, I have!)

Santa* just might bring you the Christmas present you dream of……

* the existence of Santa is only a theory and is disputed by many children. However, it hardly needs saying that if Santa doesn’t bring the presents, who does? If there is no Santa why are pictures of him seen everywhere in stores and on cards? Furthermore, without Santa’s commandment to “Be good or you won’t get any presents” everyone would be bad and western civilisation would collapse. The “Christmas Conspiracy” theory, that all parents in the world secretly buy presents for their children on the same day every year, is so clearly paranoid and implausible that only anarchists, communists and other unbalanced secular extremists continue to defend it.

So how about some bags. Just as the military seems to drive technological innovation, and porn drives internet innovation, handbag designers seem to drive adaptive reuse innovation. Take this gumboot bag for instance.

What could be cooler. It’s by Saskia Marcotti of the Belgian designers vlaemsch() but since you can’t copyright an idea, do as swissmiss suggests and DIY.

Perhaps you prefer cowboy boots? Then the cowboy boot bag from RodeoQueen is for you. But where have the soles gone?

Well, Nike has been using them for their sole bags, but like most Nike products they are ugly as sin and there is the matter of exploiting child labour. Just don’t do it!

A far more desirable version of the same idea is designed by Naoto Fukazawa of PlusMinusZero except you can only get them in Japan. It’s a canvas bag with a real shoe sole from a shoe (Uwabaki) commonly used in schools in Japan. Go to their elegant website and drool. (It’s a bit puzzling that most reviews of this bag say “This is one bag you can place on the ground without worrying about getting dirty” because we have never had such a worry. Should we start worrying? Or should we just carry a crucifix brush

from Citizen:Citizen to remove that ungodly dirt?)

Or perhaps the skate deck bag is more your…errr…bag?

Made by FocusedBags, the bag on the left has the added bonus of old grip tape on the handles that can be used as an emergency nail file. The one on the right is described as very rare because they use only genuinely pre-snapped skate decks - that’s integrity!

And if nothing there suits you, please tell us. We’ve had so few comments lately that despite our rocketing stats we’re starting to feel like this.

Perhaps wearing real beer goggles during this orgy of materialism and false bonhomie may innoculate against the alcoholically derived version. They are made from actual beer bottles

and if you want to accessorise you can get a ring and a tie to show conclusively that you really are a complete twat.

We found them on Boing Boing so by now the entire world has probably tried to check them out and Urban Spectacles’ site has crashed from overload.

    

They also make frames from wood and reused materials like record vinyl, including glow-in-the-dark old Kraftwerk albums.