Visitors outside the finished building. Photo by Janean Parker
Art Under the Wrecking Ball
A doomed building becomes an experiment in freedom, expression, and community
By Shawn Rossiter
When the Taliban regime dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan in early 2001, the international community responded with outrage. The Muslim regime’s rationale for the barrage of dynamite and tank fire directed against monumental sculptures carved into a mountainside fifteen hundred years ago was a quest for religious purity.
In the summer of 2007, Salt Lake City planned the destruction of one of its own artistic monuments, the 337 Project.
Though it stood for only a few months (and no tanks will be used in its razing), the 337 Project’s planned demolition was driven by another sense of purity, an artistic one. And the people who will cheer the wrecking ball are the same who created the experiment in art and community building. At least 144 artists from all corners of the local art community, ranging in age from four to seventy-eight, worked over a three-month period covering every interior and exterior surface of a derelict downtown building, knowing their creation would be open to the public only for a couple of weekends before being torn down in July.
In a society where the contemporary art world generates billions of dollars in revenue every year, the project’s imminent destruction made the process of its creation an exercise in detachment and an ode to impermanence. It also opened new vistas of artistic possibility in the community, probing the possibilities and limitations of collaboration and artistic freedom.
The 337 Project was born of a chance encounter and a seized opportunity. Salt Lake City residents Adam and Dessi Price hatched the idea on a trip to Manhattan, where they visited the 11 Spring Street project, a building in New York City’s NoLIta neighborhood that served for years as an unofficial canvas for street art. Before new owners transformed it into condominiums, they opened the interior for an exhibition.
The Prices had bought a building at 337 S. 400 East in Salt Lake City—originally constructed in 1910 and remodeled numerous times over the years—with the idea of renovating it one more time, keeping the lower floor as office space and turning the top floor into their own residence. But the building was in such sad shape, its spaces so out of whack, that it had to be torn down.
Before that happened, the Prices decided, they would give the building over to artists, who would turn it into a 20,000-square-foot visual spectacle.
The Prices’ involvement in the rest of the project was largely laissez-faire. They handled financing and legal issues, coordinated general concerns, and spent days guiding members of the public through the building. But when it came to curating the artistic output, they stood back and let fate take control.
To get the project going, the Prices originally developed a lottery system in which 50 artists could lay claim to spaces by scrawling their names on walls. Then, these artists recruited their friends. When the first exterior piece of art went up—a simple goldfish visible a block away—people began walking in off the street asking if they could be involved. No one was asked for a resume or list of recent exhibitions.
What made the building at 337 South hopeless as a residential or office space made it perfect for an art project. The diversity of its off-kilter angles, surfaces, and spaces proved to be fruitful material for the varied artists who came to be part of the project; in the building’s labyrinth, young, self-trained artists made their work next to degreed professionals. The building’s diversity also reflected the thousands of people who eventually thronged to see it.
In 337, individual artistic visions abutted each other in a maze of spaces. Views from one room informed the next. And almost no “piece” could be seen with a single glance, as can happen with a painting. The works encircled, surrounded, overwhelmed. To even speak of them as “pieces” belies the collaborative effort that gave space to individual vision but also subsumed it to the experience of the collective whole.
One of the most dynamic aspects of the experience was the chaotic but creative mingling of artists that created a contemporary collaborative where street cred was as important as university cred. Some of the artists knew each other from their time in the graffiti community, associations at the university, or area exhibitions, but just as many made new relationships as they bumped past each other in the narrow hallways, borrowed ladders, shared pizza, or brainstormed what could be done with a piece of bare ceiling.
The project stood in stark contrast to the idea that art is a commodity: With no concern for economic benefits, the artists threw themselves into their work. Most of them say the temporary nature of the project allowed them to experiment; it was a catalyst, spurring them to new possibilities. Rather than being put off by the fact that the building would be destroyed, they were encouraged and energized, knowing the work wouldn’t be around to haunt them.
“I worked harder at it, knowing it would all come down,” said graffiti artist Ben Wiemeyer.
Artists are generally solitary creatures, used to long hours working alone in their studios. So one of the project’s greatest challenges was to see how more than 100 people, each with their own visions and egos, would get along in the same space with so few controls or sources of authority. The street graffiti artists came equipped with a well-established set of ethics that helped ease any possible tensions.
“You absorb those ethics the minute you start,” Wiemeyer said, noting that all of Salt Lake’s best graffiti artists came to work on the building. “It gets spit at you from everyone around you.” Those ethics determine when and how it is appropriate to work with another artist’s work, which surfaces are appropriate to use, and the type of work each context demands.
Artist C.J. Lester liked the idea of art without the censorship or politics that can come with institutional exhibitions: “We did not have the typical constraints of a gallery’s aesthetics, the looming of potential sales influencing our creative process, concerns about the public’s response to our work. In other words, we were free to make what’s in our souls and reveal it for public consumption—not the ‘art’ public, but the general public.”
For his top-floor room at the front of the building, Christian Arial took a collaborative approach, inviting anyone to come in and leave marks on the walls. An estimated 500 people came through, leaving stencil art, graffiti, tags, clipped art, and other artistic footprints in what became the building’s semiotic romper room. One of the first rooms most visitors entered, this space served as a visual lexicon for the rest of the exhibition.
The collaborative nature of the project was not without its problems. In Arial’s project, one collaborator went overboard, not quite getting the concept or knowing how to deal with the freedom offered. Some didn’t like the results of the open nature of the selection process, either. Other artists became territorial, content to stay in the confines of their assigned space. The worst incident occurred when one, going through personal emotional turmoil, thought others had taken his space and began defacing their work.
The 337 Project was so wholly original that there is really no measuring stick to determine its success, but despite a few individual reservations, the artists expressed great pleasure in it. And during the three months of its creation, it transformed the neighborhood. One day while there, Adam Price was called over by an elderly man passing by on the sidewalk. “Some people think graffiti isn’t art, but this is art. God bless you all. You are saving this neighborhood, and you made me smile for the first time today,” the man said. Servers at Ichiban restaurant across the street came over for their own private tour, and the neighbors were delighted that something was finally being done with the abandoned building.
The excitement the project generated during its creation mushroomed into a frenzy of activity when the building finally opened its doors to the public. During the brief public opening (six days total), Adam Price, a trial lawyer for Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough PC, moonlighted as an art-spectacle impresario. Sunburned, fueled by adrenaline, his voice hoarse, Price called out ticket numbers in sets of five. As thousands entered the building free of charge, waiting up to three hours in 90-degree temperatures, Price was the envy of every arts administrator in the valley. Many of the visitors had never walked into a gallery or art center. One preteen boy on opening night went scurrying about the building for more than an hour, looking for artists (identified by a “337 Artist” tag) and asking them, “What wall did you do?”
Price estimates that at least 20 percent of the people who went through came back for another visit, usually bringing a friend or two. During a private viewing held by Jones Waldo on the Tuesday after the opening weekend, one lawyer was so moved by the experience, she teared up.
The more art went up, the more people participated, the longer 337 stood, and the more it was visited, the more dear it became to those involved. And the harder, it seemed, to let it go, to let it return to dust, to become the tribute to impermanence that had been its driving force in the beginning.
By the time the building opened for public display, artists and patrons were discussing strategies for how to preserve the work. Scores of visitors to the building mentioned a desire to save it, to keep it as a public landmark. The Salt Lake Art Center considered saving some of the works for an exhibition on the project’s one-year anniversary. Others thought pieces of the building could be sold off at auction. Thousands of dollars could be raised for charity. As well intentioned as these suggestions were, others asked, would this defeat the point?
Many of the artists created work with the knowledge and even enthusiastic acceptance of its destruction; as Arial said, there’s “no other motivation that’s really possible but art for art’s sake.” Some felt that in an exhibition, their works would become displaced artifacts rather than part of a living space, and that the inevitable curatorial process would destroy the project’s democratic aspect. Because it would contradict both the idea of impermanence and the spirit of democracy that pervaded the project, those artists fought against such an idea. “There are no precious objects here,” Wiemeyer said. “The process was precious.”
A few weeks before the close of the project, Adam Price said, with a wry smile, “I don’t think we’ll achieve full purity.” But the more the project progressed, as the Prices came every day for more than a week—turning on lights and fans, installing doors in the sculpture garden—the more they became committed to the original idea. They were as exuberant as proud parents, but their child had taken on a life of its own. “We thought a lot about how to start this project,” Adam said one evening as he closed up shop, “but not a lot about how to finish it.”
The Salt Lake Art Center decided against having an exhibition but plans one with documentation of the project’s development and destruction. While a few of the artists would like to see the building preserved or used for charity, the majority continue to hold to the original concept, to let the process live in the transformed communities that were involved but to let the physical creation turn to dust.
Within months of demolishing the giant Buddhas in 2001, the Taliban were driven from power. The 337 Project may not herald a regime change of that scope in the local arts community. But even when the brightly painted exterior stucco is discarded and the unique environments created in the building's interior live only in digital formats, those who experienced the project are sure that its effect will last. “The popularity of the project among both artists and the general public clearly demonstrates a deep unspoken need for this type of communication, this type of coming together without the typical social restraints and limitations,” said artist Grace Ann Polon after the public exhibition closed.
Jann Haworth, another artist involved, described the 337 Project as “a dream, and like water in sand, it will vanish.” But, she added, “Most importantly—and I don’t believe this is an overstatement—Salt Lake is changed.”
Shawn Rossiter, a professional artist who lives and works in the Sugar House area of Salt Lake City, is the editor of contributors Summer 2007 Artists of Utah’s online visual arts magazine, 15 Bytes.
