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Defensive Space
Philip E. Harding
Defensive space is a work that has grown and changed over many years
and continues to change. When I was in the last year of my undergraduate
program in architecture, struggling to reconcile many conflicting ideas
and feelings about the practice of architecture, I made a model, the base
of which was an attempt to combine the circle and the square and the top
of which was a barbed wire dome. I ended up trashing the base but kept
the dome. About four years later I saw a flyer soliciting entries for
an “Expressions of a Nuclear Age” art exhibit at the Fremont
Fine Arts Foundry in Seattle Washington and decided to incorporate the
dome into an entry.
Part of the sense of conflict I felt during my architectural studies I
was still feeling while back in Richland but for different reasons. Richland
is conservative community. (I regularly receive ballots where there most
of the races have a republican candidate running unopposed.) I don’t
know if it still has the honor but growing up I was told we had more police
per person than any other city in the state. The economy was and in some
ways still is dominated by large corporations who receive the large defense,
energy, and now clean up contracts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
It is a place where a generation of workers were sworn to secrecy, where
parents couldn't tell their children what they do at work and where friends
you went to high school get jobs they can't tell you about. This is the
kind of place where security agents would come to your door and ask about
the guy living across the street several decades before 9/11. Growing
up here I learned that a voice critical of nuclear energy would not be
heard out. For years there was a consistent denial that Hanford had any
kind of toxic or radioactive waste problem. Nuclear waste, it was argued,
was a resource that could be refined and reused indefinitely. It was only
after a string of budget cuts, including the mothballing of the Fast Flux
Test Facility that the problem of waste clean up came out of the dark.
Now the study and clean up of this most contaminated site in North America
has become big business and the new source of massive government funding.
There are still some, mostly diehard engineers, who want to revive FFTF
but it is a lost cause. Now, with the skyrocketing price of oil and the
drumbeat of energy independence, you will hear people talking about building
more civilian electricity producing reactors again but we will have to
wait and see.
The undercurrent of defensive paranoia and the shift from a free civil
society to a security state that most of the country only experienced
for the first time with the passage of the patriot act has been a constant
in Richland since the 1940s. I had never tried to express this mood before
but I had always felt it, and when I saw flyer for the Nuclear Age show
I felt compelled to enter. As I worked on the project it completely took
over my life. There is a scene in the movie "Close Encounters of
the Third Kind" in which the protagonist is making a huge sculpture
in his living room. My living room looked something like that but with
shards of glass, sharpened bamboo sticks, curtain stretchers with their
rows of pins all centered on my barbed wire dome. I mixed up batches of
baby blue plaster and mounted the shards and sticks around the dome. I
then took a hand crafted stool from Afghanistan that was falling apart
and removed the straw that was stuffed in the rim and used it to build
a comfortable nest inside the dome. Within the nest I placed several dozen
porcelain milling balls and painted the last one bright red. This contrast
between the protective interior and the dangerous exterior is my experience
of Richland. If you are on the inside Richland can seem a beautiful, safe,
suburban community. The schools are good, the crime rate is low, the lawns
are kept mowed, the local paper doesn't criticize Republican government
or Hanford contractors and everyone is comfortable and safe. There is
also profound ignorance of the consequences to the outside world of what
it takes to maintain this kind of culture. Minorities don't seem to settle
here and until recently if you are down on your luck you could expect
a free ride to the mission in Pasco where you were out of Richland's sight
and mind. I confess, I have been conditioned since childhood to be one
to keep my mouth shut and this sculpture, and this statement about this
sculpture is rare for me.
After exhibiting Defensive Space in the Expressions of a Nuclear Age exhibition
and several related follow up shows I didn't know what to do with it.
It is a dangerous object to have around. I cut and punctured myself on
it a dozen times. After a while some of the glass shards and bamboo spikes
were broken off and I ended up moving the thing, first into a shed and
then out onto a picnic table in the yard. Mice chewed up the straw, leaves
fell on it and decayed, the color faded, I made a few modifications including
splattering it with paint and nailing an elm sucker to it, but I could
not bring myself to throw it out. In the mid to late 1990s, about ten
years after the exhibition, I built a special case for it with handles
so that it could be safely transported and stored. I am still not sure
what to do with it. In the last year I decommissioned it. I removed it
from the case, broke off the dangerous bits and moved it back out into
the yard. I am tempted to clad the base in lead but weight has always
been one of its problems. I remain a solitary artist and without the kind
of government funding that keeps nuclear power projects and its waste
well managed it is hard to deal with hazardous art.
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