MAP

2009, sidewalk scrubbing on Geary Street, San Fancisco, CA; accompanying video documentation

At the time of the performance, Geary street was the unofficial boundary between the rivaling Nob Hill and Tenderloin neighborhoods. While the petite bourgeoise courtsied around the upper-class hill-dwellers, raising rents with each admitted reach toward the next social rung, their values were expressed. Hip bars and coffee shops speckled the neighborhood border in semi-permanence, living as short as a lease span and as long as losing shimmer; boutique apparel, laundry services, and yoga studios took root.

Between these establishments and lease terms a mobile permanence penetrated the neighborhood: the crack junkies, tranny prostitutes and homeless. The distinction of those climbing and those between displaced was starkly contrasted by the velocity of the individual on the street. The roving inhabitants of the Tenderloin converted unclaimed storefronts into crack-pipe oases, restrooms, or "nappening." Block-long monologues crowed for the homeless shelter's daily dispersion.

Rentals addressed the conflict with the amalgamate "Tendernob," a code meaning your rent will increase in the next term if you can endure this term. Students from the for-profit chain Academy of Art University, an institution that was blatantly exploiting the real-estate investments throughout San Francisco, anonymously fulfilled the need for a body with unlimited loan leveraging power to occupy the frontier like pawns.

The steep faces of the hill acted as a barrier as much as the strategic absence of public space or even places to comfortably sit. Geary street was the bottom of this steep face, where the relatively horizontal splashed against the relatively vertical.

It seemed that everyone, city officials, developers, landowners, curators and artists, were working to change the Tenderloin. A makeshift group of the aforementioned staged a project entitled "Wonderland," which simultaneously addressed the changing neighborhood and applied cultural forces. Their unique contribution was their own presence. The proposed context, a forum in which gentrification can be discussed, parodied the actuality of instrumentalized public artworks throughout the neighborhood. Not surprisingly, the public discussions around the project reached no denouement; only a seachange in the social climate could validate the discourse or suggest better tools.