Upon reading An Army of Lovers and coming across that opening concerning the little plot of land that's not quite a park, but not quite a municipal place to hang, but not quite a place for hobos and drug addicts to lay, but not quite a place to walk one's dogs and push one's baby in a stroller, I realized due to my unfair advantage as an Oakland resident I know exactly what Koki and Demented Panda are talking about.
Their names by the way, as mentioned in the acknowledgement section, comes from Bhanu Kapil, who is an amazing writer and I highly suggest checking her out as soon as one possibly can after finals or whatever is taking up one's time from reading such a delightful person's work.
Anyways...
HERE /THERE is a metal instillation commissioned by the City of Berkeley in 2011 on the corner of Martin Luther King JR. Street where it loops from Oakland to Berkeley. The BART runs above it, there's several lanes of traffic to its left if you're coming from Oakland, and the street itself conflates Adeline into it as well. So a block later the Ashby Bart is a triangular meridian that separates MLK on the left, Adeline on the right and that eventually becomes Shattuck, with Ashby St. closing the triangle of the BART station hub and parking lot. Here are some delightful pictures of the sign existing peaceably enough as the gigantic eyesore that it is to me as an Oaklander from OVER THERE.
The artist who did this is named Steven Gillman and this was a collaboration with Katherine Keefer. Click this for the short art bio.
So why would this art be the central focus of the text? Is it because of the fact that it's nine feet tall and made of steel? Is it the fabricated space of the natural world?
Well, it truly does serve as the middle ground between two "very different" cities- "Here" is Berkeley and "There" is Oakland, but during all the protests that have ever occurred in these respective cities, with the tendency to utilize main streets like Telegraph or MLK to fuse from one city to another, the response by the police departments is exactly the same: crush the protests with militarized tactics and weapons. Through imagery in the opening and concluding chapters of the novel, visual connections are drawn between the Here/There art installment, the park beside Berkeley High School on MLK and across the street from the Berkeley Police Department which had an Occupy movement of its own, simultaneously alongside its big bad brother in downtown Oakland at Frank Ogawa/ if you're a protester like myself Oscar Grant Plaza. All of these spaces are relatively the same size, but the Occupy Movement became focused upon Oakland for being so crazy, so radical, and too outrageous compared to their humble civilized persons on the HERE side. This dichotomy is maintained through the art, plain and simple, but these images, some of which are actually ones I took a few months ago, showcases their blatant similarities in times of possible revolt and revolution.
Remember months ago when people were walking onto the freeways during week long protesting? Well, this is an image I took of the Berkeley Police Department, mixed with what I suspect were Highway Patrol, making a game plan before heading OVER THERE to scary Oakland to check the protesters. This is coincidentally right beside the HERE/THERE art instillation, but it's not pictured because I was in genuine shock when I was coming from Berkeley and stumbled upon about sixty or seventy police personnel in cars and on cycles around me like this.
A week later, I heard helicopters swarming above my parents' house in Oakland, a block or two away from the Macarthur BART station. From Ashby BART, this is the next stop, so they're in walking distance of each other if one wanted to do that. Macarthur's station is above ground on pillars, while again, Ashby is below ground because Berkeley is so much better than Oakland and had to preserve the surface level. Back to the anecdote, there's a Highway Patrol Office at the end of my parents' street on Telegraph and sure enough, much like the week before in Berkeley, the pigs- I mean officers- were swarming in their hive:
They were actually shining flashlights in my direction because I was trying to get a larger shot of all that I was seeing, but they didn't like that. So this is all I got to take that came out decent, but again, about sixty of them were preparing to march down.
So through the use of the middle ground land where the HERE/THERE art is placed, Spahr and Buuck, or perhaps it's better to say Koki and Demented Panda, instill that the Othering that Berkeley has the propensity to do when it comes to Oakland is silly when at the root of it all, figures of authority come to stomp out reformative change. This makes the unquestionable connection that the art's segment of land and the tent city that cropped up at the park I alluded to (which I can't find good pictures of) isn't so far off from being what Frank Ogawa/ Oscar Grant Plaza became for all those weeks it was occupied.
From my perspective on the ground and in all of these places, even though the following comes from Broadway and 14th Street in the center of Downtown Oakland, it all visually and aesthetically looked the same to me. Frankly, I'm proud I'm from OVER THERE because we at least TAKE ACTION, instead of jacking off on the days of old when some college kid talked about the fears of being part of the cog in the machine; then, we included the current generation of UC Berkeley kids into this ever so profound movement as one, without the distinction that tasteless art creates between us:
