Having proudly stood vigil on the Duwamish for over twenty years, Paragon, the large wood and steel sculpture there, is quietly slated to be demolished by the City of Seattle. Having created it, I now have little hope that the sculpture can be saved. Yet as a long-time public artist in a place that helped enshrine public art in the national consciousness, I feel obliged to speak out. Public Art in Seattle began as a transparent community-based process with artists being supported in innovative ways by the Seattle Arts Commission (SAC). It has become something altogether different, and that deeply troubles me.
Over a year trying to deal with ARTS, the renamed Seattle arts agency, I was continually confronted with obfuscation and being told that what I proposed was impermissible according to the City’s legal authorities, with whom I was never allowed to meet. Trying to unscramble invisible eggs cooked up by unseen chefs was decidedly Kafkaesque.
The Paragon, named for a wooden halibut schooner built in Ballard 100 years ago, features a 3/5 scale wooden boat frame, its form taken directly from the original plans. The sculpture was built and installed by the Port of Seattle on the Duwamish. The wood came from old-growth fir timbers and the boat frame was built by once and future boatbuilders at Tacoma’s Bates Technical College.
The wooden boat structure was chosen to represent the long and often tragic history of fishers and their wooden fishing vessels on the site. Duwamish people lived and fished there in canoes for well over a millennium, until being starved out by industrial-grade pollution that rendered their fishery untenable. European immigrant fisher persons found their way to the abandoned waterfront and built houses and a collection of boat-building sheds. They launched their wooden boats on the Duwamish and headed out to cleaner waters.
In turn, they were chased away by the Port which (re)claimed the land and immediately began bulldozing the wooden structures to build Terminal 107. Work was halted by the State Office of Archaeology which suspected there had been a native village there. The Port agreed not to develop the land and make it into a park. I was offered the possibility of creating a sculpture for the park, if it sat very lightly on the land. I worked with the Duwamish Tribe and the Port to create a suitable design. A fine and welcome challenge.
As I researched the history of the site and interviewed community members, I learned what had unfolded there. I decided to place the wooden boat frame high in the air, out of harm’s way, and to serve maritime history as a 3-D billboard for passing motorists on West Marginal Way. I created a series of graphic panels with narratives about the various people who lived there.
Since they didn’t yet have an art maintenance crew, the Port turned over the newly installed Paragon to the City of Seattle for its care. As required, I submitted a maintenance plan to SAC, calling for periodic inspection of the wooden structure, and power-washing and resealing, when needed. ARTS performed the maintenance once in 20 years. This despite my entreaties to inspect and treat the visibly aging wood, and that of their own conservator who for years advocated the same to her superiors.
Anticipating a joyous centennial celebration for the original Paragon last summer, I insisted last May that the wooden frame be inspected and cleaned. To the conservator’s horror she found rot and an army of carpenter ants eating away. Immediately, ARTS told me the entire sculpture would have to be destroyed, it having become a safety issue, their “number one” priority. I replied that wood could and should be repaired. I also asked why their concern for safety hadn’t led them to maintain the sculpture.
ARTS has now answered that question publicly, saying they have insufficient funds to maintain their public art collection. If they cannot be cared for, then why do they commission new works?
My “discussion” with ARTS about the Paragon has been characterized by months of waiting on faceless, nameless city lawyers to determine next steps. I was told repeatedly that besides safety, risk management was the arts agency’s primary task.
As an artist, I court risk — it being essential to what we do — tempting fate by embracing the unknown. I understand that cities cannot exactly be looking to be risky, but turning themselves inside out to avoid it might be worse than counterproductive. The Paragon’s death sentence is being driven by Seattle’s all-consuming fear of lawsuits, such that common-sense solutions like replacing rotten wood become outrageously complicated.
Working with communities and a wide variety of institutions, I’ve completed complex collaborative projects around the world. The public process is messy, full of tangents and false-starts, time-consuming and cumbersome- but jumping in builds in meaning. The wholesale adoption of “risk management” by ARTS seems to have put it on a collision course with the art and artists its mission says they support.
Once word got out that the Paragon was in trouble with the City, abundant support came from the West Seattle community, and Nucor Steel stepped up with a terrifically generous offer to provide financial, logistical and material help. They arranged for Barnhart Crane to lift the wooden boat structure off the steel supports and bring it to their nearby facility on the Duwamish. While the ants ate away undeterred, we were told that Barnhart could not touch the sculpture. Risk had to be assessed and managed, never mind that Barnhart is licensed, bonded and insured and does this very thing every day. The boat was not allowed to be moved.
The few “meetings” I’ve had with ARTS were all online. In a year, I never heard from the city’s public art manager. The two committee meetings which will seal the Paragon’s fate, though technically “open” to the public, will not take place in a physical space, and will be completely mediated by the computer. With everyone off in their own corner, turning from human contact to screen-based ‘gatherings’ seems inherently antithetical to building or serving community.
Could it be that Seattle, epicenter of tech-ness, has moved itself irrevocably from the collaborative face-to-face, hand over hand work of making public art? Is “public” art now a misnomer?
Paragon celebrates the Duwamish’s long social history. Taking it apart will literally undue its artfulness and historicity. From the beginning, my discussions with Nucor, a large mill producing steel components, were about what the sculpture has meant to the community. Ironically, with ARTS it was the very opposite. The sculpture was seen as so many potentially harmful pieces, never as a city treasure.
Deaccession, the “technical” word ARTS uses to explain its planned destruction of Paragon, is a bureaucratic way of saying letting go, without saying so. This wordplay allows them to destroy art without explicitly stating so. The decay of the Paragon seems to me emblematic of a terrible decay in public discourse and public process. In Seattle, we seem ever less able to say what needs to be said or do what needs doing; meanwhile the ants continue eating away.
Don Fels
Don Fels is a visual artist based in the PNW who works globally. He finds collaboration particularly appealing and delights in creating partnerships across culture, language and institutions. View his work at www.
