So I went to the street I have been intrigued with for the last two weeks. It came to me as a potential location because of my "experience" of it this past summer, when I would park on Neilson Street and walk up Bishop Street to George Street, where I would head for Voorhees Chapel. The street I was always bothered by was Bishop, because there was no way to get on campus, without walking a few blocks up to George, the main road, and then another half a block until you could finally step foot "into" the campus. The high fence divide perplexes me and I wonder why it is there and what purpose it is supposed to be serving. I went there a few times this week and just walked the length of the street, seeing what I could see, though I didn't know what kind of "something" I wanted to place there.
My main interest stems from the ways in which the fence and the experience of walking down Bishop Street illustrates the constructed boundary between the city of New Brunswick and the "separate Universe-City" of Rutgers.
At one point, my observing poet-mind took over and I scribbled out a poem on the spot, which I then recorded the next time I was there. I've called it:
UniverseCity: Who Goes (T)here? I didn't make any attempts really to edit the poem because I wanted it to be kind of impressionistic and as spontaneous as possible. As I was recording it, ironically, one of the gates for cars opened just as I was walking past it, and you can hear the beeping alarm in the background of the recording just about the time I say, "I see gates with enormous padlocks." The timing was a bit disconcerting. It was after doing the recording that I decided I wanted to come back and attach copies of the poem to the fence.
I attached a few handwritten copies of the poem, printed on notebook paper, which I oriented "landscape"/horizontally in order to reflect the vertical lines of fences and to break with the standard way/mode of writing associated with academia. This break/disruption of normalcy and the "rules of the page" were important for me because I want to question the boundaries we practice.
I used poems to fix the poems to the fence/walls with band aids, as a way of designating a kind of injury or wound, or a recognition of such. Krzysztof Wodiczko comments on the bandage as "the oldest and most common reference" or symbol to the kind of design and articulation "of what is most questionable and unacceptable" (Critical Vehicles, 9). He says, "A bandage covers and treats a wound while at the same time exposing its presence. Its presence signifies both the experience of pain and the hope of recovery" (9). As I see it, the fence stands as an eyesore, as well as a symbolic (and also very literal) divider of people, of knowledge, of access. I hoped the band aids would serve as a sign of healing, or desire for healing, as is hopefully begun with the process of questioning and recognition brought up in the poem. The many-tiered division between academia and the neighborhood is very problematic.
Here are the pictures...
