Mel Chin is an environmental activist/artist who has created projects that have served simultaneously as an art and science project. In Mel Chin’s SPAWN project, he sought to change the association of worthlessness with abandoned houses. The idea arose from the imagery of burning houses in East Detroit from Devil’s Night that was stuck in Chin’s head. During a PBS interview, Chin explained his intentions for the project, “The project is about transformation on many different levels.” The night before Halloween came to be known as “Devil’s Night” because of the vast amounts of vandalism that occurred. What began as petty acts of vandalism such as TP-ing, and egging turned into more dangerous acts such as arson. This trend grew when landowners started burning houses to collect insurance money because they could not sell the properties amidst the tough housing market. The property owners would use the Devil’s Night as a cover for their arson. During the mid-to-late 80s, hundreds of fires were set on Devil’s Night, especially affecting Detroit’s inner-city neighborhoods. These haunting images of burning houses were engrained in Mel Chin’s head, and he created the SPAWN project to help change the negative connotations connected to the abandoned houses.
As an artist, Mel went into the abandoned homes to see what he could contribute. His intentions were to take something that would be considered of no value (remnants of a burned abandoned home), and to remove it from shame and restore value to it. Through the idea of conceptual art, Mel Chin would return life to some of these homes. His idea was S.P.A.W.N. (Special Projects Agriculture Worms Neighborhoods); he would take one of the houses and put it on a pivot. Chin turned the basement into something that would raise earthworms or nightcrawlers that could be sold to the many fishermen of the Great Lakes. To the naked eye, the structure would still appear to be an abandoned, useless house. However, in actuality, the house could be moved to the side on its pivot and the basement geared to raise worms would be revealed. Chin explained his output in the PBS interview, “My contribution is two-fold; to create something that will be living after I am gone so that it can be returned to the neighborhood, and, at the same time reclaim an icon from what it has been depicted now as.” He took what he called the ‘internal organs’ of a place and used it in a whole new way, rather than simply reconstructing it.
Mel Chin may be hard to categorize as an artist because his work is so multi-disciplinary. His work is not necessarily aesthetically pleasing, but it can help economies, environments, and dying cultures. Chin describes his artistic process in Marilyn Stokstad’s book Art History (3rd ed.), “Rather than making a metaphorical work to express a problem, a work can tackle a problem head-on. As an art form it extends the notion of art beyond a familiar object-commodity status into the realm of process and public service” (1186). Chin believes that art isn’t about one particular method, “The diversity of medium and techniques is minor, but the diversity of ideas and how they survive and the methods they are transmitted is what’s most important.” Mel Chin defies what the naked eye assumes. He finds inspiration in dying neighborhoods, symbols, and lands and breathes new life into them.
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