High on a pole overlooking a quiet street on the border of Emeryville and Oakland, Calif., a ravioli pin is getting a second chance at life. No longer locked in to kitchen duty, overworked and underappreciated, it is part of a soaring white sculpture that also includes a retired fan belt and an amputated chair leg.
About 50 such sculptures-all gleaming white and topped with recycled geegaws-line the streets of the neighborhood.
You don`t have to get out of your car for this drive-by gallery. Admission is free; hours unlimited. People can come in the morning when the sculptures become one with the fog and return at sunset when they stand stark against a purple sky.
These sentries the neighbors have made are subtle. At first glance, you might not even notice them. ”When you know they`re there, suddenly the street is reinterpreted,” says Slobodan Dan Paich, the Father of the Flagpoles, an architect who started the project. ”There`s a presence.”
The project`s purpose is to plant art directly into the community, and for it to grow as tall and wild as the people want. Art on the street, out of galleries and museums, out of spotless glass cases and roped-off spaces. Art that is for the neighborhood. Art that is the neighborhood.
Each sculpture is unique, yet each forms part of a larger whole-much like the denizens of this East Bay habitat. A diverse, multiracial community exists in these several blocks, mainly artists and working-class people, but amiably including lawyers and other white-collar types. In the yards, cats prowl around plastic flamingos, and wind chimes join in together for daily sonatas. On busy San Pablo Avenue, the gritty strip that runs through the neighborhood, soul-food joints stand next to Chinese restaurants. Across from an ashram is a Baptist church; two doors down, a Black Muslim bakery.
The tall poles on which each sculpture is built give them their uniformity, and many have ribbons tied to them that blow crazily in the breeze. But that is where the similarities end. One looks like a crocodile`s mouth, another a baseball-bedecked snowshoe; one curves and sways like the birch tree behind it.
There is no official plaque down here dedicating the project to some long-dead city official, no guidebook lists it as a quirky sidestop. The sculptures can be found on Vallejo Street between Stanford Avenue and 59th Street; Fremont and Marshall Streets between Stanford and 55th Street; and Gaskill Street between San Pablo and Hollis Street. More live in the parking lot behind Golden Gate Library on San Pablo, and more are being evolved at this very moment.
The residents call them flagpoles, although instead of flags they`re topped with stuff ranging from bits of machinery to palm fronds to crocheted lace doilies . . . place mats . . . plastic grapes. . . .
In a way, they are quintessentially Bay Area: individual, esoteric, politically correct (by using recycled materials). They might stump archeologists of the future. ”I know this is a fan belt,” one might say, sifting through the remains of a sculpture in the year 5000. ”But what do the ribbons and the rolling pin have to do with it?”
In the beginning, a neighbor approached Paich about making a big piece of sculpture for the community. Paich didn`t think the idea was quite right; he says he didn`t want something that stood up and screamed, ”I`m art!”
”I thought it would look odd,” he says. ”I wanted something more whimsical, commemorative, totemistic.”
He started mucking around in his garage and emerged with the first pole, graced with a windmill and ribbons of green, blue and gold.
Then neighbors began to talk, as neighbors tend to do, and one by one they began shyly showing up at Paich`s door with odd bits of furniture in hand, some salvaged from the junk yard, others varnished with childhood memories.
An understanding
At first, many of the neighbors didn`t quite understand the poles; some still don`t. Others have come to that beautiful realization about art, any art: You don`t have to understand it to be moved by it.
”The more I`ve gotten into paying attention to it, the more I think it`s a really sweet thing,” says Laura Ingram, an editor to whom Paich gave one of the first flagpoles-the one topped with what looks like a snowshoe. ”They`re beautiful. And I particularly like that it`s made out of found materials, no money involved.”
Marge Gibson Haskell is an Oakland City Council member who was canvassing the area one day when she spotted the sculptures. As with others, her first thought was, ”What in the heck is this all about?”
After talking with neighbors and Paich, she set about securing a grant through the city of Oakland. The flagpole project, she says, lets people
”express themselves in their neighborhoods.”
Other cities might look upon the project as another loony California idea. ”Expressing ourselves” should not be a civic priority, they might say, not while racial tension, crack and joblessness plague many parts of Oakland. Yet as neighborhoods become increasingly more diverse, Haskell replies, this is one way, perhaps, to unify them.
Unlike a neighborhood barbecue, where the people head home when the potato salad runs out, the project, as Haskell says, ”leaves you with something.”
The grant has enabled Paich to start Saturday pole-making workshops, run in a soothing, egalitarian atmosphere. They take place in a parking lot off San Pablo, inside a tin shack that sits next to an expired RV camper.
Paich is a gentle, Zen-like soul who gives limitless amounts of time and heart to the project he started. If you ask him why, he will shrug softly with a look that says, why not? The original democratic idea has remained the same: art of, by and for the people.
Paich`s own life is a collage of sorts. He was born in Yugoslavia and lived in England for 18 years before moving to the Bay Area.
His tiny, sunlit place is bursting with his creations: avocado pits carved into haunting, angular faces; elaborate sculptures made out of twigs; a shiny, carved wooden box with a clay man inside, bent wearily over a bench. Outside in the garden, a plaster Roman head presides over the flowers-it`s used as a model for the drawing classes Paich teaches.
Actually, there`s little Paich doesn`t do. He is chairman of Friends of Drawing, which runs summer drawing workshops around the world, and is a founding member and art director of Oakland`s Augustino Dance Company.
At the flagpole workshops, Paich says, he finds many people a little bewildered without A Plan. It can be confusing, he says, to be able to make anything they want out of any materials they want. After a while, though, they seem to get the hang of it, that no plan can be the best plan of all.
There are exceptions, however, such as a woman who came to one recent workshop. Disdaining help, she pulled a power drill out of a shopping bag and proceeded to construct a pole in about 35 minutes, an elaborate one resembling an archery bow, festooned with marble-like spheres. ”I`m a carpenter,” she said, a little apologetically.
Later, she told of seeing the poles mysteriously pop up on her street, of wondering, at first, if elves had put them there. Paich confessed that he and others often install them in the dead of night, so residents will be surprised at dawn.
Inside the shack, a white pole lies on top of two sawhorses, waiting, as Paich puts it, ”to be composed.”
”That`s the beginning of something,” he says paternally.
It sure is. –
