Here the map becomes the territory. We set out to the so-called 5th Avenue Peninsula, our only guidebook a small booklet entitled "An Inexhaustive Investigation of Urban Content," put together in 1995 by the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use and Interpretation. Filled with archival maps and photos, along with a key to a number of sites in the so-called "peninsula tour area," the decidedly non-touristic plot of urban refuse, industrial run-off, light industry, artist squats, and polluted marina junkyards becomes reframed into zones of public art, where the act of guided looking becomes a heightened form of cultural and geographic literacy.
The site photographed here the guidebook refers to as "Oral Alley," a "sort of drive through boudoir, as it is a favorite spot for prostitutes to bring their customers and perform their services … During the day it is frequented by Caltrans and Port of Oakland workers who like to park their trucks here and take naps." Given that the alley so named is far from any center of conventional urban intercourse or commercial traffic, and given CLUI's talent for pushing the poetics of the documentary photograph (and caption) to the most bone-dry (and seemingly apocryphal) of hermeneutics, the status of this site as "real" is brought into question, although, then again, there it is, on the map, in the guidebook photograph, and again in front of us in actual space.
The 'tourist' is thus led through an otherwise unremarkable zone of cast-off urban space, the gaze now redirected downward for used condoms and any other archeological evidence that might confirm the guidebook description. But what exactly does one hope to see, to find, here? Some suggestion that "ah, things are as they are described"—? Are we photographing "Oral Alley," or am we merely documenting our shared belief in its existence? Or is it our active participation in a conceptual artwork that, with enough willing imaginations, can actually transform a vacant alley into a tourist destination by virtue of sheer descriptive framing? Because it has been named, photographed, and mapped, it exists. And as such, writers, artists, cultural cartographers and (de)tourguides can perhaps once again open up new vistas and through-ways of public art and consciousness, simply by bringing the convictions of their visions to bear upon material reality.
—David Buuck, reporting for B.A.R.G.E.
Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics
