Mudflat (1980)

a stinking bile Cesspool of untreated sewage in 1953 and you could smell it from the freeway as a child I'd peek over the car window and sneak a lookout at the stagnant Bay in rotting wood when I looked back the smell was unbearable and I still remember it later the city of San Francisco had changed CH I was still driving on the freeway along the mud flight but over the years the land had changed the mud flat was different it was now an art gallery and I could see strange wooden figures as I drove to work they passed quickly and there was never any time to know who built them or why the road to San Francisco had become a drive-through art gallery thousands of motorists plant every day but it was the ER of the automobile stopped only for traffic there were giraffes Wooden Ships and kangaroos along the freeway each morning people came from all over to build Chinese dragons elephants fish and totem poles but you never saw anyone building these huge mysterious sculptures I was drawn to the mud flat some said the place was magic sacred like Easter Island these sculptures were artifacts of our culture only they were temporary disposable changing daily the mud flat was in a Time Warp and this was a stage where people could play out their temporary dreams daring Defiance of death it was a carnival and inside every sculpture there was a story each figure was an echo of a youthful memory fantasy the sculptures were actors Frozen in time and this was a stage where people could play out their dreams who built this art I began to spend all of my time trying to find an answer to that question [Music] [Music] well maybe the first question is what is a Sol Marsh to a lot of people it probably appears to be just sickly plants and smelly muck but it's a lot more than that this is one of the most productive environments on the face of the Earth it's more productive than a rice Patty or or an Iowa cornfield and it's a it's an enormous ously intricate laboratory for mixing water and nutrients and sunshine to produce a tremendous abundance of Life the water flowing in and out of this Marsh and at the same time it's tremendously fragile and susceptible to human disturbance 20 years ago you couldn't even come out here it was one stinking mass of human sewage but now the marsh is growing again there Clapper rails back in the cord grass there can be up to 10,000 th Shorebirds here at one time every year Arctic turns come in through the Golden Gate and stop here for a few days the only place on the Pacific coast of North you never know what kinds of things you can find here this whole area around San Francisco Bay and up into the Delta and in the central valleys was very likely the richest place on the entire face of the Earth after the end of the pine there were more large animals and large birds here greater concentrations of life than any place else including the great valleys of Africa it's an incredibly fragile Place more fragile than these delicate ephemeral sculptures that people put up the remarkable thing is here we are in San Francisco Bay in the middle of one of the largest urban and industrial areas in the United States we're surrounded by freeway and if you can just turn your back on it for a moment there's all of this abundance and activity going on for me it's a very powerful affirmation of [Applause] life this is the Emoryville mud flat good place to find clams I use the Driftwood here to make sculpture this Driftwood has been coming in here for hundreds of years uh I understand that some of the stuff is Teakwood they used to use it for pallets stuff that come in from the Orient there's also all kinds of Styrofoam floats from boats that get wrecked and as you can see there's the bottles and tires and then there's Plywood And you know just about anything that you need seems to be here when you need it people have been putting up sculpture here since uh the 50s or possibly before they used to have duck blinds out here for the hunters and I think they used to decorate them up then when the freeway was put in in the early 50s uh people would put up these sculptures mainly oriented so that they could could be seen from the freeway so they tend to be rather one-dimensional some say that some art classes from the local colleges came out here and and again in the early 50s and started putting up the sculpture see all kinds of people out here especially on weekends there'll be uh you know young couples putting signs you know welcome home so and so uh political advertisements uh all different uh like there's some kind of a union thing going on here with the teamsters and the markets uh right now peace signs saskas everything out here this sculpture it comes and goes you got uh people out here all the time building things uh taking pieces off other people's sculpture uh this is fine the kids come out and run around on it and it gets knocked down by the wind or the water um but it doesn't matter you know we we find pieces here and there and we use them or discard them uh that's a lot of the beauty of this place is it it just sort of like graffiti it uh nobody takes it too seriously it's just for fun uh this is my sculpture I build it uh primarily as a place for exhibiting other pieces of sculpture it was fun building it as it stands it's a it's a good sculpture but I'm going to put other things such as a ballerina and uh I have various ideas of things I'd like to put up on the top of it with this freeway out here I get great exposure thousands of people see this thing but I built this thing for the fun of it uh I'd come out here in my spare time if the uh the winds or the tides or the vandals liable to knock this thing down in a week or it may be here for years but I had my fun in building the thing and I'll keep on building here I don't care if my sculpture or any of this stuff out here really gets preserved except maybe on film The Beauty of it to me is the fact that it's transitional just like these Tides coming and going it's always changing the train is now delapidated and broken down but at the time we did it we had gone to great detail and make it as authentic as we could we had a dining car you a caboose dining car had tables and chairs and it had um lights and fixtures and with in it we had an oil car and even a coal car with a few pieces of coal that we could find laying around and also I thought of the train as a large toy and if you look at it it looks much like voice set and I think that's one thing I wanted to get across in the sculpture it kind of represented to me uh somewhat of the fantasy of my youth uh I remember trains in the area I remember passing a train as I was on my way to the project basically the whole sculpture is just made out of junk that was laying out there it was very important to me not to important anything except perhaps his nails to hold the figures together but not to bring anything from the outside world to the mud flats cuz that would have been in a sense litter I wanted to do something that was going to last I wanted to do something that people were going to notice and something that they were going to enjoy seeing day after day now it's been two years this is one of my favorite places I've always cared a lot for marshes and mud flats this kind of intertial Zone which is never really the same it's always changing uh in fact you can feel that we're on about 100t layer 100t layer of soft Bay Mud In fact when you we embedded the post into the ground you could feel the shock wav going out uh that's a Davis bicycle up there and uh those are all pieces of things that had been uh here before some of them were for signs that had sort of talked about the International Hotel saving it uh other things for a danger uh piling this is a sculpture made by my friends in honor of my 50th birthday I can't think of a nicer birthday present it was called canned fish it isn't made from Material that's found there yet the fact that it was a fish and also the fact that it's recycled material see to make it fit into the mud flat concept at first we were thinking of building one of the great symbols of the church but we decided on a bald eagle instead because it was Washington birthday we wanted to wish everyone a Happy Halloween we're not artists will we call our piece a scarecrow in a pumpkin patch I wasn't one of the instigators but someone got the idea to build a uh peer built truck on the um mud plat and it was to everybody's amazement as a matter of fact you know when about 5:00 it was just getting dark and some trucks started going by on the freeway and some of them started hunking their horns at it and we realized that it could be recognized as actually you know a truck cuz we couldn't really tell at the time we call it the uh summer solstice totem pole that 25 people helped make to me the totem pole is very special because a lot of people had come together touched it built it added some spirit and then took it to the mud flats and put it in this unique area that that the kasan Indians also thought was unique if you look closely at the totem pole it reminds me of the kutuk cult a long time before this was a sculptural park this was an important Indian site about 3,000 years ago this was the center of activity for Costa know Indians and one of the largest Indian shell Mounds in California was situated about 300 yard from here the Indians were no doubt attracted to the area by the Abundant shells the birds and the fish that were here these are some artifacts excavated from the shell mound in 1924 and the first of these is a bone whistle with one hole which may have been used in a dance Pavilion or sweat house on top of the mound the second piece is a quartz crystal probably from the sier Nevada and such pieces as these indicate trade between Coastal people and the mountain people this Crystal was used as a wand or was the end of a wand and is decorated with small shell beads 3,000 years ago the land probably looked a lot like this and over there you can still see the place where the original Mound was and there may have been a tascal or sweat house on top of the mound at that time in 1878 a Dancing Pavilion was built on top of the mound and it became a part of what was called shellmound Park the population of the East Bay grew tremendously at the turn of the century and there was an influx of people who worked in the machine shops and local industry after the first world war industry grew along the San Francisco Bay and in the 1920s the automobile became a more common means of transportation unfortunately shellmont Park and the old Indian Mound were completely leveled in the name of progress to make way for new industry in 1924 when the mound was being destroyed an archaeologist named skank estimated that there were about 600 burials underneath the floor of the old Dancing Pavilion [Music] this piano came from the home of Joseph Amry the founder of amville my name is madin cie Thompson my grandfather Captain Ludwick cie founded shellmound Park and organizational picnic grounds in 1878 I grew up there until 1924 when when the land was sold for industrial purposes I would like to show you some pictures of my family and of the park this picture is a very important picture it was taken in 1907 right after the earthquake and fire my grandfather and father invited refugees from San Francisco to stay in the huge dance civilan and also in tents outside the picture shows my grandfather my father and some of the employees and also timcal Creek which ran through the park shell Mount Park was uh an organizational picnic grounds and for the uh Midsummer day and the Swiss relief and the uh German day in October were those that Drew the largest crowds the Swedish organization had a Midsummer day annually and on the at that time they erected a huge M Poole which was very beautiful with streamers and flowers the first picnic was always the first Sunday in March because there used to be a big worry was it going to rain then and that made quite a difference as to how many people came they was always worrying about the weather and um the picnic season extended uh to the first Sunday in October and then after that why the uh shooting season began I also remember that in 1923 a film director named Eric Fon stroheim used the merry ground in his film greed when I look back at the M pole the dance Pavilion and the picnics at shellmound Park those were some of the happiest days of my life [Music] w [Music] I love [Music] cool it's cool [Music] [Applause] [Music] Now ladies and gentlemen I call your attention to the Rope precariously stretched above the abyss Yonder a death def staring of Courage will now be performed by the great The Fearless Cliff spanger all right [Music] all right yeah [Music] o [Music] w w [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] miss it let's go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] a [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] when I back at when I looked back looking back at those times when I look back when I look back when I look back when I look back when I look back when I look back this was probably the richest place on the face of the Earth after the end of the pene hundreds of thousands of Tuli elk here and in the Delta and in the Central Valley the center of abundance for grizzly bear tremendous numbers of prorn antelope vast numbers of water file coming down and wintering here would fill the sky for hours as they flew by [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the weird thing is I never saw anybody building anything out there you'd go out and one day they would be very little and the next day they would was a whole group of things like it sprung up out of the mud I never knew where it came from or who did it it made me curious we worked most of the day on what was to be the RKO Tower from The Rocky Horror Picture Show it lasted about 5 seconds and we gave up I didn't notice my sculpture from the freeway when I was just driving by I'm not I'm I get tired of looking at that same old St day in and day out day in and day out it might be down well you know how things are out here they don't last forever I hope it's still up though but you know I would I would really like very much to go down there and uh take a hatchet and render some of that junk back into junk in order just to make some more scraps for the next person to come along and pick up and have some building materials you know they want to put their name on it they want to own it and see I built that that's mine well it's down I didn't think it would stay up forever but I thought it' last a little longer than this hasn't even been up a Year wish I could have been here when it's when it toppled though it would have been interesting pretty impressive you know seeing that thing fall I don't know if it was the wind or the vandals that got it looks kind of interesting though laying here there lots of good wood that can be used for other sculptures get a little bit uh a little bit sad a lot of work went in into these things I know it's part of the process out here but I've had a lot of fun with it somebody will probably take this this wood and use it for other things I think I may get started and I'll use some of this wood to build something else I'll probably get going on it maybe this afternoon or tomorrow the nature of the mud flat was contradiction and change it was an art gallery where the art was destroyed it was a wildlife sanctuary where they killed Ducks building in destruction these activities went on side by side it had always been that way an entire civilization had thrived and vanished on this spot without a trace an American era had come and gone so what was the Driftwood art it was a monument to change it reflected the nature of the the land it was on the delicate changing edge of the Earth the beauty of it was that it was transitional just like the tides coming and going it was always changing and it was preserved for a while on film [Music]