1904

a circle drawing; 40th street Cut the

The 40th street Cut project had a year long journey of weaving a section of the Oakland earth and skies together with many lines, points and people between. For me and my learning process , I am closer to home, more resourced and connected to my neighbors and neighborhood as a result. It is spring again and all the lines layed down along the creek and the streets converge and resound in subtle ecologies. This project may be completed but the lines and channels stay open, even when they become filled back in with dirt and plumbing and condominiums.Drawing a circle. The effect of the Cut has really been about drawing as an extention of the body: outward in participatory gestures and inward in integration of observations, ideas and themes. Drawing energy up from the slides and shifts below the ground and like a metaphorical pantograph drawing power down from the catenary lines that display a lattice of latent electric energy. When framed it becomes an imaginative drawing into place.

Bringing the 40th street Cut into the gallery was a challenge of translation. Our collaborations were oblique translations. We worked to take all the conversations and material generated from our research and process and cut into it, strip it down, then lay some figurative tracks and elaborate plans specifically for The Oakland Art Gallery’s unique space. It was a real pleasure and challenge to build a space that engages people and participants with a kinesthetic and perspectival conversation, to activate an immediate attention and awareness. The multi-faceted set-like environment or setting invited active perceivers, agents of curiosity and wonder. This perceptual immediacy is drawn into the space, making a social artwork.

Faces creatively shine out from the Glenn Echo Creek community and address one another, they simultaneously meander and hold perspectives, bound in the lifestream of the neighborhood. Along these currents we can look to each other and recharge our interdependence and spirits.

The train-pantograph was originally designed in Oakland for the Key system and electrically expanded to the rest of the world. Our duel-pantograph-circling-orrery is a fascination device with kinetic sine-wave circuits and converging shadows. The translating pantograph emanations are reflected in the beauty of its copper forms.

A holistic, subtle ecology can not exist without its system circumscribing and drawing from the hidden, imaginative realm. What is unseen is imminent and like the idea of dark matter it is structuring and elaborating subtle ecologies.

By invoking the tradition of the mural and original 18th century panorama painting, (looking from the inside phenomena), the 40th street Cut’s culvert span is a view of the neighborhood as carefully blended core samples of views and fragments with loans of symbols, ideas and icons.

Plum bobs and counterweights expressed the force of gravity and its mysterious terrestrial role, holding us up toward the sun and down to the center of the earth.


Creative participation is an intrinsic counterweight to holding up an ecological image before it can be seen.

Installed!

Some photos taken by Jeff Meyers during the installation of the exhibit:

40th street Cut on Kahn's Alley

At the Oakland Art Gallery, the installation is in, the exhibition is up.

It creates an environment that references the neighborhood parameters and historical circumstances by setting up specific kinds of perceptual and/or spatial questions and conundrums in the language of a set-like environment. This is a multi-layered activity of framing social awareness with two coequal layers: the first being the process of translating the data of our research and the experiences of the neighborhood into an art environment of signs and language. The second being the installed environment experienced and interpreted by the observers and participants to be a new unique landscape of wonder and fascination reflecting our unique community.

Copper Flags and Co-Factors

While watching the rain on the gently moving surface of the creek through the lens of my super 8 camera I was intrigued with an acute vertigo. An enigma of my gravity. The expanding concentricities of the raindrop-effects were merging and elaborating with radical speeds and tube torus geometries.

My feet slipped on the concrete and I started. Then my smeared reflection spoke to me and I noticed how attention moves like water, in some primal recognition of birth in currents, as a symbiotic partner making formations, then measuring and writing and drawing ourselves notes. The water eyed. It is the water that does the seeing, the translation of these visions and spreads our experiences like those effervescent voices of sprites resounding across the fluid surface in concatenated gyros. I guess I heard the Echo from the concrete.


On the highway above, the traffic, and on the power-lines the sizzles. Glen Echo is itself a power-line cut through and shaping down these lowland hills providing this area with much ecological diversity and transportation on the creeks’ own scale. The looming tall trees that weave and stand over the houses and apartment buildings are a giveaway for the underground course of the creek. The life of this Glen Echo insinuates itself into all the homes in the neighborhood in hidden and discrete ways.

I wonder about the residents dreams that are directly related to the creek. Are these dreams more tributary paths of the watershed?


Copper flags modeled after the small colored plastic indicators of municipal underground Power Line layers and regional native plant restorationists have been set and photographed to chart the path and circuit of the flow. The watershed is an underground labyrinth, an intrinsic system of movement and flux in the biosphere where deposits of vital elements of the microcosm, mineral, fungus, slimemolds, insects, seeds and pollen, are transformed and dispersed into all the variety of communities nearby.

I consider the flags little signs, mineral co-factors that catalyse my mapping of Glen Echo and the power coursing in the neighborhood. Copper helper molecules that assist in cultural language and its biochemical transformations.

Fortunately, during the residential development Glen Echo was left day-lighted in a few choice spots as it draws down to enter Lake Merrit. The creek is most certainly a large factor for the residential neighborhood development that occurred between 1895 and the 1920s. It has structures by Frederick Reimers, Julia Morgan, A.W. Smith and C.M. MacGregor and still has surviving elements from the 'City Beautiful' movement. These lovely exposed sites along the meander are currently tended to by a dedicated group of restorationists and neighborhood eco-activists, official and volunteer.

The headwaters of Glen Echo Creek are above in the Oakland Hills upstream of Blair Park. This creek is circuited in an awareness of time that is often hidden from our day to day concerns yet was and remains an effecting part of an expanded idea of the transportation system in Oakland.
Creeks like Glen Echo have always been a draw, a destination as well as a navigational marker, indicating some direction of this more abstract flow: the boundaries of property and language for daytrippers, cartographers, developers and architects to respond to. They are a natural cut through the land, clear writing seen from the flash of a birds eye.


The late 19th century’s dream of electricity and transportation created another kind of writing across the sky seen from a landed eye. Power lines and high voltage use, domestically and for trains. The Key System made an impact on the land not only locally but worldwide by exporting the design of an invention called a Pantograph. Modeled and named after an intriguing device of the 17th century to copy and scale diagrams used by Architects, Mapmakers and Typographers based on parallelograms. A translation of a translating device. The Train Pantograph maintains electrical contact with the overhead contact catenary wire and draws power from the wire to the traction unit, for electric locomotives and trams. The diamond shape version was designed by John Q Brown for the Key System at the turn of the 20th century.


With power the Key System carved up the sky and moved people all across Oakland and the Bay. Putting in new lines and tracks meant many new cuts and carvings across the land and by turns, new neighborhoods.

One such important landmark became known as the 40th Street Cut. This Cut was a channel on 40th Street between Broadway and Howe on its way to the Piedmont Street Station. This remains a peculiar site in 2008-2009, where the street is doubled and the hill has not quite been restored but retains an echo of its own former use. I am fascinated by the short-lived trestle that had a mid way reach across the Cut.


And what happened to the Flagman's Shanty?

I continually find all of the doubling and ghosting of power lines, above and below, very compelling as well as intimate, poetic guides through the area. The address of the Cut. This is the attractor and namesake of our investigations throughout our neighborhood.

Groove In

Here we see the excavation of the 'Cut' and a little piece of Oakland around 1900. Not all grades were leveled but this ridge was deemed cut worthy.
(Photo courtesy of the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association at the Western Railroad Museum)