San Francisco - City Profile - Part 1
To profile a City. What is it? To profile?
Most every morning - here in San Francisco - I walk to the the top of a hill above my neighborhood. Some call it ‘Liberty Heights’; the hill and its neighborhood divide Eureka and Noe Valleys. At the very top, on Sanchez, just off 21st, there a wonderful chair there, really a ’sculpture’ that a commissioned artist carved out of a large Redwood burl. It’s curved interior sides, including a scoop-spoon-shaped back, form a comfortable embrace; I find it a wonderful place to sit, write, draw, contemplate and/or look north across the City’s neighborhoods and beyond Pacific Heights to the Bay and hazy blue shapes of Angel Island and Richmond shoreline. Since, apart from myself, I rarely have seen anyone sitting in the chair, I have taken to calling it “my throne.” Ironically, neighbors - as they walk dogs, or pass by on the way to their cars - will say, “Thanks for sitting in the chair.”
Sitting there this morning, I am immersed with my ball-point tipped pen where I make work inside one panel of a blank, multiple panel, Japanese accordion-fold book. I am listening closely and letting my hand and pen make dotted and small slash-mark accounts of the jerky movements of the breeze (its edge of slight chill), the abrupt, intermittent whacking chirp of the bird in the garden bushes up behind me, the whirr of tires crossing the intersection, the distinct rise and fall of an ambulance siren somewhere down below, the occasional solid wooden echo from carpenters dropping lumber off a truck on to a sidewalk, and automobile alarm being setting with a quick beep. The panel gradually begins to fill as fingers and pen intake and register the various pulses of the immediate city. For a week now, every day I make one of these panels. When I look at several panels - the sequence is broken evenly by alternating empty panels - the work begins to appear as if it is a special kind of visual cardiograph of the City, the one in which I live and walk.
I am not quite sure why I find it important to do this. The work seems so immediate and relatively pure. There is not a stitch of narrative in it; perhaps my intention is only to make a kind of primal register of what crosses and claims the path of my attention. Indeed, the process of making this work feels quite musical, but only occasionally in a melodic sense, where, for example, the pen traces an extended curve to correspond with a fading ambulance siren. More often than not, the dots appear more like a complex and visual manifestation of drumming; the pen - conducted by both sounds and the movement of the air is keeping time; the measure and length of each dot, the sequences and combinations that strike the paper are a register and shape of the way in which one’s body is permitted to receive and respond to ‘the contents’ of the City. As a ‘work of art’, for what it is worth, the successive panels become a way to afix a time, a space - an offering to others who seek a profile of and/or guide into ‘hearing’ the City.
In a utopian urban world one might imagine that this core listening experience - apart from the sheer appreciation of it - would rest at the origins of any ‘culure making.’ That is, the experience of close listening and, ultimately, close looking would be at the origins of giving shape to music, architecture (houses and landscape), urban planning, political action, as well as the arts of so-called ‘fiction’, poetry, and, certainly, dance.
In other words, as citizens - let alone artists - we would not be permitted to act until we listened and looked closely at the spaces which we inhabit. Ideally, I suspect, that intimate association with materials is at the heart of the City public “hearing” and “permit” process in which public officals make informed decisions about the literal shapes and forms of public and private spaces.
(To be continued)