Inaudible Nonsense

A friend wished someone a happy blogoversary on Twitter today.  This got me to thinking about when mine was.

I blogged the last semester of my senior year in art school that was 2002. My first post was September 26 of that year. It was an interesting experiment. I tried to use the format as an open sketchbook to talk about my influences, and to follow my ideas as they became projects.

In light of my renewed interest in the human environment (the interaction between people and the space and community around), I had forgotten how important that was to my work 5 years ago. I found the following post (after the jump) dated 9-27-2007 and thought I”d repost it here. Its more relevant to who I am today than ever:

Art can be anything that we say it is. So, Richard Long can crisscross England on foot and be known as an artist and not an outdoorsman. There is a priviledging of aesthetical experience that helps broaden the view of “what is art”. Art school is about paying a lot of money to make things for four years. Or, so they would have us believe. Try not making things, try only talking and thinking. You’ll be admonished. Or misunderstood. Or, so I’ve found. Ah, to be the misunderstood artist. How romantic.This morning, we led a walk down a median of Mandela Parkway in West Oakland. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake rendered the Cypress Freeway useless. Built through the neighborhood in the late 1950s over what was then Cypress Street, the Cypress Freeway was a double-decker noose that further divided the struggling West Oakland neighborhood. Those of us who were old enough to remember, later recalled news stories of the cars trapped between the decks of the freeway. Often, only one person from a car with an entire family survived. It was pretty horrific at the time. And eventhough I was living in Chicago then and was only 15, I remember the whole situation vividly.Our idea this morning was pretty simple. Oakland has a trouble with self-love. It gets trashed by its own residents more than any city I’ve ever seen. The streets and sidewalks in Oakland function as a public garbage can. Our group thought that it would be a good idea to explore this stretch of urban history by picking up the trash. After we had cleaned up a couple of blocks we would leave wildflower seeds so that in the spring, their would be secret reminder of our having passed through. A second stage to our renewal efforts.This all seemed pretty straightforward to me. But I was reminded today how sometimes a simple act can be revolutionary. Mandela Parkway was renamed as part of a vision for this now freewayless but still barren stretch of Oakland. The community set about trying to convince CalTrans (the state transportation agency) to create a greenway down the median. A very narrow park if you will. Think of the panhandle in San Francisco, and make it about a block narrower. Well, it’s been 13 years, and just the very first inklings of change of begun to happen at the site. It will be at least another 2 years, before we start seeing the vision others have for the area.The slow progress of change here hasn’t affect anyone’s ability to enforce bureaucratic turf wars. The neighborhood was stunned by our activities. A local landscaping crew that was working at the housing projects nearby told us they had never seen anyone pick up trash before. Eventually, we caught the interest of a City of Oakland clean-up crew. They wanted to know why we hadn’t contacted them. They wanted to give us trash bags, haul away our collections, and offer us orange vests. Only the fact that my mother teaches at the elementary school where the head of that crew went to school (a coincidence indeed) did we confuse them into calming down. She also reminded us that we were not on City of Oakland property but on CalTrans property.Who should show up next, but CalTrans. CalTrans wanted to assure us that this whole section was about to be cleaned up. (We’d seen there cleaning efforts in the first block, where we had walked away with some of our most full trash bags.) And that they wanted to thank us but let us know that whatever work we had done was about to be plowed over anyway. They recommended that next time we clean up the sidewalks along the edge of the Parkway. (This, of course, would be back to City of Oakland property.) I was stunned really. We had done something so easy, so harmless and yet this had been interpreted as a direct challenge to more than one agency’s management of its land. We had stepped so far outside of their conception of “what people do” that they could only step into bureaucratic maneuvering.Revolution does not always have to be about walking through Berkeley naked. Do anything outside of the expected (and we have such rigid expectations, so this isn’t difficult) can be the much stronger action. Angry rebellion is expected and trained for by armies and police forces around the world. But 10 people picking up trash in West Oakland just threw everyone for a loop. Amazing.