Last Saturday night, the Seattle artist team of John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zack Culler celebrated their ability to keep on keeping on through a morass of ecological setbacks and bureaucratic hurtles by throwing themselves a small party at their site.
The party had to be small, because they have no right to occupy the premises on which they pay rent. Nobody has occupancy rights, not even the owner. The EPA doesn’t want people to hang around unless they’re in hasmat suits.
Dealing with the EPA was never part of their plan. Their original idea was to create a mini-park/sculpture on the Monorail Line, but when voters said no to expanding the line in 2005, the idea lost its base. Not for long. Four years ago, they rented an abandoned gas station on the corner of Warsaw and Ellis, between Boeing Field and the Duwamish River, one of the most contaminated in the country.
Before renting to them, the owner showed them a 1980s clean bill of health from the EPA, which, as it turns out, means little. Because the station had been vacant for three years, another inspection was required.
“The ’80s were the dark ages of environmental cleanup,” said Ben Beres. “They’d dig a hole and sniff. This place wasn’t soil tested.”
Tests revealed more than the localized gas pump pollution the trio expected. Instead, 12 feet under the soil is a free-ranging plume of contaminants. Instead of the usual clump-and-treat method, the brown field they’ve been happy to call a home away from home requires a far more complex intervention.
Walk away, friends said. SuttonBeresCuller are not environmental artists. They’re performance artists who make things. They have no manifesto to consult or burning desire to save the earth. Till now. They want to turn a ruined mess into a pocket park, public sculpture, experimental exhibition space and environmental remediation project and leave it as a gift to the South Park/Georgetown communities.
The hunt continues for funding and permission from a web of agencies. Creative Capital gave them $50,000 in 2005, and 4Culture just wrote a check for an Arts Cultural Facilities Award of $68,000. After the cleanup, they’re going to bury the back of the station underneath a grassy knoll and light the park with solar panels.
When do they think it will happen?
“2010,” said Sutton. That would be a small miracle. Brendan Kiley’s story here.
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