July 2006 (II): Hearts And Hammers

During the 1990s, I led the pink collar life in Seattle. And like a lot of city residents, I was unhappy with the Seattle Art Museum's 1992 decision to install a behemoth Jonathan Borofsky "Hammering Man" statue.

Photo: Matthew Langley



According to museum PR, the statue was meant to "honor the working class"...or some such. Even though—after decades of Republican rule—pretty much any manual trades that hadn't yet been killed off were about to be.

A more credible representation of the "worker" theme would have been "Keyboarding Woman" [Earning 70.8¢ to Man's $1]*
*1992 figures from pay-equity.org

As a decade later, "Bangalore Call Center Employee" could be truest to life.

But in '92, "Hammering Man" was on his way to Seattle, and this worker did plenty of mouthing off about it.

Much of the local arts world was displeased at being bypassed—not just for a "name"—but for a name that seems to keep selling knockoffs of the same statue. Among the numerous other versions prior to Seattle's is a nearly 70-footer (21 m) in Frankfurt am Main.

Then, in 1993—on the first Labor Day after installation of Borofsky's "worker"—some locals made a very direct response—

Photos: Barry Wong/The Seattle Times
Eric Scigliano tells how the ball-and-chain was created, then attached to the statue, by a group of

...about 20 co-conspirators, ages 20 to 40-plus, including ironworkers and artists, Job Corps alumni and activists. Over nine months, they secretly built a tarpaulin-covered workshop and fabricated the 6 1/2-foot, 700-pound ball and chain of industrial 14-gauge steel. To guard against rolling, they flattened the bottom of the ball. To protect the sculpture from damage, they lined the shackle with heavy rubber.

They planned their installation with bank-robbery precision. First they staged a full-dress rehearsal, complete with a dummy foot, in broad daylight in an outlying neighborhood. Then on Labor Day, they installed it. They clocked themselves hoisting the ball from their pickup truck, positioning it at the real foot and locking the shackle with a precisely machined steel pin: 31 seconds.

The project was the brainchild of a guerilla artist calling himself "Subculture Joe"—in Scigliano's words, "a 23-year-old metalworker with a penchant for conceiving colossal pranks and a rarer talent for mustering collaborators to realize them, with less utopian notions of work than Mr. Borofsky's."

Scigliano says of "Joe," who learned his trade in the Job Corps, that

chaining "Hammering Man" appealed to him not just as a prank and statement; it offered an answer to his discontent and a way to "rally the troops" for a bigger agenda. That agenda entails using guerrilla art to give other disaffected young people purpose, industrial skills and, finally, employment. Dada meets the Job Corps.

Scigliano's entire NYT story is here. The public's response to the Labor Day action: 70% of those polled found the ball-and-chain an improvement to the original, and they wanted it to stay.

The city removed the attachment, but didn't press charges. After a city arts administrator sniffed that Subculture Joe's group were not artists, but mere "fabricators of the attachment," the group happily appropriated the term as their new name.

Fast forward three years: to July 15, 1996. It was a Monday, and I was at work a couple miles from the city center. Sometime that afternoon, word got around that a bomb threat downtown had central streets closed off and traffic immobilized.

As details emerged, it became clear that this was police overreaction to a non-existent threat. A tipoff: the "bomb" was...
...a 10-foot anatomically correct sheet-metal heart, placed in the bed of a graffiti-covered junker truck. (Photo: Stefanie Boyar/The Seattle Times)

By now, giant metal hearts were well-known locally as the trademark of "Subculture Joe"—who himself was now well-known by his real name, Jason Sprinkle.

Before the "bomb threat," Sprinkle and the Fabricators had installed two previous hearts, in exactly the same spot: a (at the time) pedestrians-only section of downtown Seattle—

... on Valentine’s Day [1994]... the Fabricators erected a heart for "the unloved," inviting spurned lovers to write the names of their beloved on it and then to strike it with a sledgehammer.

Later, in January 1995, the Fabricators built a 13-foot, three-quarter ton steel heart pierced through the center with a 12-foot pole in the shape of a knife. This sculpture was left in Westlake Park to protest the decision to reopen Pine Street [to vehicles]...

The decision had been made in a vote after the Nordstroms, owners of the Seattle-based department store chain, said they would not open a flagship store downtown... unless vehicular traffic were restored to Pine Street. Some felt the decision had damaged the public character of the park and represented a surrender to the rich and powerful. In this spirit, the Fabricators painted slogans on their heart, including "Big Brother" and "Corporate Interests." After negotiations with the Seattle Parks Department, Sprinkle hauled that heart away.

On 7/15/96 Sprinkle acted alone—and on impulse—for the first time. The latest heart had been created as a "Heart of American Youth," that Sprinkle planned to deliver to President Clinton. He traveled from Seattle, stopping at Job Corps sites and having kids sign the heart (and his truck).

He got as far as Utah, where Job Corps officials objected to graffiti, and Sprinkle refused to censor it. He returned to Seattle, frustrated about the project fizzling out. And it seems long-standing emotional problems began to get the better of him.

Sprinkle decided to make what he saw as a gift to the city in farewell to the pedestrian mall: he parked his truck, let the air out of the tires, and walked away. He lingered close enough to observe passersby laughing at the spectacle—and a meter reader ticketing the truck.

At some point police spotted a bit of forgotten graffiti under the grille. It was from an Idaho Job Corps trainee and referred to his program—"Timber Lake Carpentry rules. The bomb!"

The bomb squad was called.Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A robot was borrowed from the county.Photo: Tom Reese/The Seattle Times

Sprinkle called the mayor's office to say the vehicle was harmless, but an aide hung up on him. After having a reporter friend contact the police, Sprinkle was arrested that evening. Bail for the unemployed artist was set at $100,000.

Running mainly in the Business section, the Seattle Times' subsequent coverage was along the lines of, Westlake Shoppers Just Want To Forget 5-Hour Evacuation.

And a report on the day following the scare: City To Buy Bomb-Fighting Robot—

Monday afternoon, the council turned down a request from the Police Department to buy such a robot. But just a few minutes after the rejection, Councilwoman Jane Noland, chair of the public-safety committee, was among the thousands who got stuck in traffic during a bomb scare in Westlake Park.

That was enough to change her mind and the minds of other council members, who yesterday approved spending $120,000 for a remote-controlled robot.

And on further political ramifications, Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett—

Some say Jason Sprinkle is Seattle's most prominent performance artist, but my vote goes to King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng.

Sprinkle left his metal heart and junker truck at Fourth Avenue and Pine Street on July 15. He intended the piece as a farewell to his brand of art on the run. Instead of an elegy, he created a public panic, with police evacuating the downtown and tying up traffic for hours. Maleng had the presence of mind to conflate that panic into a major crime and showcase himself as anti-terrorist avenger.

Maleng's more effective at street theater, beating the artist at his own game. What gets lost in Maleng's performance is justice.

Maleng has charged Sprinkle under a recent state law that makes it a crime to intimidate with an explosive. It's a felony carrying a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $10,000. Sprinkle has been in jail since the event.

Years later, Eric Scigliano revisited the events of July 1996—

...Rush-hour commuters stewed in a downtown lockdown. Talk-radio fire-breathers and newspaper editorialists called for the responsible party's head. King County prosecutor and gubernatorial candidate Norm Maleng grandstanded grandly, comparing this art attack to bombings in Belfast, Saudi Arabia and Oklahoma City and the downing of TWA Flight 800.

Exit Jason Sprinkle, locked up for five weeks, at first without the meds that kept his mental hatches screwed down. He became the first supposed terrorist charged under a new state law making it a felony to "intimidate or harass" with an "explosive device," real or simulated. This time the device was imaginary and the charge preposterous, but prosecutors clung to it for four months, until the spotlight dimmed and they settled for a trespassing plea and probation.

By 2001 I was living elsewhere and rarely following Seattle news. But in the post-9/11 course of events, I often thought of Seattle's big bomb scare. When I finally began to search the 1996 story, the first results were obituaries—for Jason Sprinkle, 1969-2005.

A sympathetic one by Regina Hackett outlines Sprinkle's story after jail and sentencing: a mental breakdown, followed by involvement in Christian evangelism. A story ending May 2005, when Sprinkle was hit by a freight train. There were no witnesses.

Very sad, but not unusual. A working class youth makes a misjudgment: one strike and you're out. Sprinkle had the misfortune to make his mistake in a public context ripe for exploitation by local political players.

An old story, but also one that could only become entangled with how well modern media exploit fear. And how the powerful rush in front of the cameras, inflaming fear to enhance their power.

Ten years after Jason Sprinkle's misjudgment about being free to make his statement, we live in a Homeland. And its Security is a hugely powerful profit machine.

Eric Scigliano's latter piece, written in 2005, is an obituary for Sprinkle, and a further reflection—

It's a sad irony, but also sadly appropriate, that the obituary lede, what Jason is most remembered for, is not his triumphs and contributions but "the bomb." That fiasco seems in retrospect a turning point, and not just for Jason Sprinkle.

It was the moment the war on terror came to Seattle. That catchall crusade, with all its jingoist hysteria, political exploitation and displaced official aggression, did not begin with 9/11, any more than al-Qaida's war on the United States did. Politicians and law enforcement agencies began ginning up the rhetoric and angling for more funds and powers years before. Fear works; after Westlake, the City Council reversed an earlier decision and bought police the $100,000 bomb-sniffing robot they craved.

Usually, when Islamists fade from the screen, "ecoterrorists" take their place as bogeys. This time an unlucky guerrilla artist did. In a way, the cops and politicos completed Jason Sprinkle's half-baked final art event, but at a terrible cost to him.