Kristin Palm's blog

I am very excited to get to introduce both David and Amy tonight, because these are two artists whose work has impacted me quite deeply and also I really hold both of them up as models of the real work place-based artmaking can and should do. Amy’s projects include “Public Smog” – which creates public parks in the atmosphere through the purchase and retirement of emissions offsets; “This is the Public Domain,” through which she continues to explore legal and sub-legal avenues for turning the ownership of property to the collective commons; and “Invisible-5,” an illuminating and captivating audio tour of sites along I-5 that have been the subject of various environmental justice efforts. Not a mere collection of facts and figures, I-5 captures the stories, the sounds, the lives that intertwine with and define these locations. It is a public project that, in the end, is quite personal.

David, too, strikes this delicate and moving balance between the communally and individually meaningful in his work. He has led several (de)tours around the Bay Area – with a focus on the hidden and multi-layered histories of often overlooked sites, movements and moments. Buried Treasure Island is his most recent project. Included in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 5 exhibit, BTI included a guidebook, audio tour, exhibit and live tour of this man-made island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.

While quite distinct, there are many overlapping concerns in both Amy and David’s work. Foremost among these, I would say, is their shared interest in the absolute essentiality of invisible spaces. Whether thinking of spaces that are literally not perceptible to the naked eye or those that have been quite deliberately erased from public concern or memory, David and Amy seek to bring or return these sites to our collective and individual conscious and consciousness. To do so, they dig very, very deep – and I don’t mean just through information and official histories, though they certainly do that difficult work, in incredibly thoughtful ways, but on a much more evocative and, I think, generous level, they dig through their own convictions and beliefs and motivations and visions. There is a palpable sense in both David’s and Amy’s work that the artists are intensely connected to these places they ponder and interrogate – and this is no small feat when you realize that, in Amy’s case, that place has been the entire Earth and its atmosphere. As a grateful participant in these artists’ works (for David and Amy, there are no spectators) I can personally say that the rigor and utter sincerity with which these explorations are undertaken has affected me profoundly. The other day, I was sitting down at the ferry docks in San Francisco, and when I looked across at Treasure Island, I felt this longing, this strong desire to return. I’ve looked at that island any number of times before and, while I’ve always been interested in the place, I’ve never felt that way. It’s David’s work that did that to me—I experienced the island with him, through him, and now I feel deeply invested in its past, its overlapping histories, its use, its misuse, its uncertain futures. I feel the same way now about sites along I-5—I can’t think of the city of Livermore now without thinking about groundwater contamination—radioactive groundwater contamination. And that may sound very technical, but it’s so much more than that. In David and Amy’s work, the data, the terminology, the official maps and documents stand in service to the lives – individual and collective lives – affected, often altered, by the agendas, actions and inactions the “official” information represents (or, often, obscures). David and Amy’s work is intellectual, certainly, but just as importantly, it’s visceral. They both emobody the best mix of activist, artist, documentarian. But I think another key to the deep impact of their work is their willingness—their insistence, really--on taking on a fourth critical role, one that I think can be the riskiest of all, and one which can really fail you if you don’t embrace it with absolute conviction, which they both absolutely do. And that is the role of citizen. There is a true sense in both David’s and Amy’s work that this role is inextricable from the others. To be an artist is not just to be a citizen, in all its complexity, but to continually question what that means and how one goes about it – how can and should one act and be and live and interact as a citizen of the Bay Area, of the United States, of the world, of global and globalized culture? This is just one of many intersecting inquiries I see in David’s and Amy’s work.

Treasure Island is our dream – a fever dream, our guide calls it—our dream of riches, our dream of military might, our dream of a little place to get away from it all, if only for a moment. “Look away from the views,” our guide requests, turn away from the postcard image, the picturesque. Everything is not alright. Named after the dream of pirates, we built this island of silt and loam—dredged it up, quite literally—to display our outsized dreams of what the future might possess for us and what we might possess in it. Later, our guide tell us, the island was to become an airport, a dream upstaged for another theater, another set. And, as the military is wont to do, once they settled in, it was a good long time before they made their exit. And, as is also customary, they left the place in much worse shape than they found it. The island is man made and, like all of our once-shining locales, so is its devastation. This afternoon we are joined by both apparitions and inhabitants, the latter interrogated so thoroughly by one tour member—“We have a native here! –so as to make this visitor uncomfortable. But I’ll admit, I eavesdropped. He pays $1900 for his place. His neighbors pay $300. The ultimate verdict of life on the island? “It’s pretty nice. Except for the toxic waste.”

Questions arise (and our guide’s insistent refrain: “I haven’t been able to get anyone to answer that.”)

Why is one building on this island inhabitable while the one next door is shuttered, fenced off?

A moth eradication project here, really?

What of the black SUVs that pull in and out of the restricted area at night? (“it’s the only site with its own private security. But since it’s a hazardous waste zone, it’s unclear to my why anyone would want to break in.”

As well as facts:

The condition of leases on the island is that there is no planting or eating food from the ground

Dramas staged here: Hulk, Flubber, Rent, Nash Bridges

Trainings/experiments staged here: police motorcycle training, fire training, military training, moth eradications testing, toxin research, earthquake simulation – “Constant rehearsals for disaster on an island itself that is a hazardous waste site and basically a sinkhole.”

Current population: 2,000.

Planned population (in eco-village): 13,000

Previous plans for island: women’s prison, Olympic center, casino, conference center, old growth redwood museum (w/ imported trees)

Our guide talks of a “reframing of the built environment for things that are no longer of use.” Our dreams, today, lack utility. And yet, here we stand, backs turned to the gleaming city, listening to a song.