Excerpt:
Named after the street on which it is sited, the Heidelberg
Project is first and foremost a dynamic bricolage of
the city’s abandoned objects. These are collected, painted
in a myriad of colours and subsequently fixed to trees,
nailed to houses, sited in gardens, or piled high in
heaps along the roadside. Cars and car parts, dolls,
plastic toys, soft toys, a boat, shoes, tyres, road
signs and vacuum cleaners all make their way into this
growing, evolving project. Inclusion of these objects
discarded by the city’s inhabitants results in an environment
that is both dependent on and reflective of the city
– a city which despite its troubles is still inextricably
linked to the car. Thus the visitor can see a fence
decorated with
hub-caps, a car painted up with the words ‘Art Rules’,
another decorated with painted circles, and a series
of car bonnets adorned with stylised, brightly painted
faces. In short, the car is omnipresent, its influence
felt along every stretch of the Heidelberg Project.
It is the car culture, so central to Detroit, that firmly
roots the work to its host city. Making sense and use
of the materials that surround him in abundance, Guyton
works on the junk that the city so readily discards,
and creates this inherent link with Detroit’s history
and culture.
The article as it appears in Raw
Vision magazine.
You may click on the first two pages for a larger image.
To read the rest of this article, buy
Raw Vision #54.