99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-22- Free Speech Monument

Episode Date: April 15, 2011

In 1989, a group called the Berkeley Art Project decided to hold a national public art competition to create a monument that would commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which began on the University of California Berkeley … Continue reading →

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but don't feel bad if you've never noticed it before. I've had people come and look for it specifically and not find it. That makes me think, well maybe I should have made it a little bigger. Or maybe that's just the cost of making an invisible sculpture. I've kind of set myself up, aren't I? That's Mark Bressfen Kempen. His invisible sculpture is known to most as the free speech monument. It's actually called column of earth and air. It's a six inch circle of soil and the column of air above it,

extending all the way to the limit of US controlled airspace hence the 60,000 feet. The column is marked by a six foot granite ring embedded flush into the concrete of the plaza, the inscription of the outer edge reads, this soil and the airspace extending above it shall not be part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entities jurisdiction.

It's a sculpture that issues the traditional materials of wood, clay, or metal, and instead uses... Jurisdiction laws and politics is kind of material to work with. The free speech monument has both subtlety and grandeur and it's also just fun and thought provoking, a new way to consider jurisdictional space. Usually, spaces of jurisdiction you enter into. You cross into a country, you cross into a state,

you move into somebody's private property, and I thought it would be interesting to kind of invert that and have a space that sort of moves through your body. And when you stand next to it today, 20 years after it was installed, you'd never suspect the drama that went on to get this granite circle placed in the ground on university property. I was kind of thrown into a little bit of a harness nest that I wasn't prepared for at

all. Here's what happened. The free speech monument was born out of an open design competition to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the start of the free speech movement. A bunch of professors, ex-professors, they call themselves the Berkeley art project. Put this competition together separate from the university. They did it as not autonomous group because they knew if they tried to go through the university to commemorate the free speech movement, it would go nowhere because at the time the university did not want to commemorate the free speech movement in any way shape or form. The free speech movement started in the fall of 1964 when students set up a table in Sproul

Plaza to recruit for an off-campus civil rights group. This was against school policy at the time. And everything escalated from there. The following months were marked by sit-ins and strikes and arrest. It was a pivotal moment that defined what we think of as the 60s, so a monument seems appropriate. So anyway, it's 1989, the call-in-out hundreds of designs were considered. So close to 300 entries from all over the country, they weeded that down to five. And there was this open period of public discussion and voting that included the public and art critics and all kinds of people outside of the Berkeley Art Project that

eventually selected Mark Bressvin Kempens column of Earth and air as the free speech monument. Democracy doesn't always work with art though so I'm glad that it worked out this time. The people who had put the project together wanted to give the winning entry to the university as a gift. And then, of course, the university did not want to accept it as a gift and did everything that they could not do. And the reason for the reluctance is that a lot of the Berkeley Art Project Group, the ones commissioning the monument,

and the higher ups at the university, were the same people who were in the fight 25 years before. And they were still very upset about it. They still had very hurt feelings. So UC Berkeley did not want to memorialize the free speech movement in general. And they hated this piece in particular. Yeah, so they did everything in their power

to not accept this gift. Which is kind of hard to do and still seem like a good guy. And after this big public selection process, they didn't have too much of a choice. So the university decided to accept the sculpture under one condition. They said, OK, we'll accept this commemoration

to free speech as long as the press release that goes out does not contain any reference to the free speech movement. That's right. The free speech monument was censored. And the unintended side effect is that it made a piece of conceptual art conceptually better. Ironically it wasn't just the university administration that had a problem with the column of Earth and Air.

A couple of the early free speech movement leaders expressed their misgivings about the monument as well. I remember having a conversation with Mario Savio. He didn't like the piece at all. Not to put words in his mouth, but I did get the impression that he wanted something that was a little bit more specific to the free speech movement in the 60s and I specifically didn't want to do that. It seemed more relevant to me to use a real person

speaking freely about something that they felt strongly about at that moment as a monument to free speech rather than a statue or something like that. The piece itself remains unfinished. The goal was to completely liberate this six inch circle of soil at the center from any jurisdiction and to do that. It would have to go through all the jurisdictions, you know, the private property owners, the board of regions, the city of Berkeley, County of Alameda, the state. There would have to be an active Congress. You'd also have to get international treaties because you don't want France coming in and taking that little piece of land.

So, you know, it'll probably never be completely finished. After several attempts, he made it only to the city jurisdiction level before getting thwarted. And now, 20 years after it was installed, I'm standing in a noisy sprout plaza with Mark Bressfinn-Kempin and we run our hands through the column of air. And even though the jurisdiction freeze zone was never formalized, I asked him if he feels something when he passes through the invisible column. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I feel like I can feel the space, you know. I grew up in Utah, and I would go to Southern Utah a lot in the four corners area. That's the only place the United States where four states come together at one point. I remember very specifically jumping from state to state, from Arizona, to Colorado, to Utah.

To New Mexico, it's also fun to lie down, spread eagle, and all four states at once. And really having a visceral feeling about that invisible line, obviously it's just psychological. But those spaces are very real. I mean, you commit certain acts in one space, and you can do it. You can make certain acts in another space,

and you might be killed. So even though they're imaginary, just certain extent they're very real. 99% Invisible was produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW 91.7 in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architect San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. You could find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars because that's my name, but you can always just find the show online at 99%invisible.org. you