On January 27 BAM/PFA opened its first L@TE of the 2012 season with The Moon (Part One) programmed by Land and Sea. As lunar music filled the museum’s architectural recesses with sound, the building itself seemed at first to animate, then hypnotize, and finally release the people under its roof from whatever mental maze we normally find ourselves in. When I arrived, children were leaping across BAMscape. A little later, a community of museum-goers sat cross-legged on the floor, backs straight, staring into the Void. By the time I left at 9 pm, the grownups were dancing. Yes, yes, it was the music that did this, but it was the architecture that made it happen.

Built as a kuntsbunker to protect art from revolution in the 1960’s, BAM is a building many people think they should dislike—so cold, so concrete, so thick, so echo-ridden, so riddled with metal-filled holes. In actuality, most of us feel deeply attached. Me, I love the battered gleam of its floors, the zooming ramps, and radiating, cantilevered galleries. Even the ceiling, which looks like a labyrinth for giant lab rats turned upside down, excites me—with the irrationality of its form.

As an experience, the building demonstrates the artistic freedom to look and listen that is as inalienable as our right to speak our minds or sleep in a public place. Witness, lying side-by-side on Bamscape, a couple, eyes closed, their bodies aligned in parallel repose within the stylized orange wave forms that elsewhere seem to erupt. There’s a consciousness that inhabits the Berkeley Art Museum that makes the building itself a throw-back to art-as-revolution-for-the-people. This is a museum where you can move, make noise, and touch things; a place to be yourself in harmony with others.

On Friday, February 10, you can hear Part Two of The Moon, at L@TE. For continued enjoyment, on February 24, at 5:30 pm, you can hear Kelsey Street’s very own Monica Peck read from her work at the museum’s new reading series, called RE@DS (at L@TE). You’ll find Monica in The Reading Room, the Berkeley Art Museum’s tribute to the history of East Bay literary publishing.

– Ramsay Bell Breslin