November / December 1998
GUERRILLAS IN PITTSBURGH'S MIDST
Writer Curt Schieber travels to Steeltown and uncovers a clandestine sculpture project in the abandoned Carrie Furnace compound.
Driving along the south shore of the Monongahela River in southeastern Pittsburgh a spectacular vision of America's Industrial Age appears just across the water. A gigantic smokestack rises hundreds of feet between four bulbous silos, themselves perhaps 200 feet tall and 50 feet in diameter. Just visible behind the structures, which are eerily imposing even from a half-mile away, are two buildings the size of aircraft hangers, half hidden by trees.
The complex appears planted in a forest, abandoned to nature. It is a strange monument to industry, given that its function as a steel mill is obviously long past. It is the Carrie Furnace, owned today by the Park Corporation and one of the last standing blast furnaces in the Lower Mon Valley, first built in 1884 and idle since the early 1980's long enough for saplings to grow on the catwalks halfway up the blast furnace towers, for underbrush to make the smaller structures indistinct even from close range, and for plant growth to choke its entries.
There are ways inside, pioneered by graffiti taggers, wayward adolescents, and assorted artists. One begins at the top of a hill in Rankin, one of many small steel towns in the Pittsburgh area depressed by the industry's crash during the early 1980s. The barely visible path leads through chest-high growth, across a former parking lot webbed by grassy cracks, over a set of railroad tracks and finally through a concealed hole in a security fence and a small tunnel dug through debris. Inside the compound, a strange variation of a Wild West ghost town opens up. The immensity of the structures in this abandoned mill can only be appreciated when they are looming overhead. Steel pipes one story in diameter join the buildings. The furnaces themselves are gargantuan vessels, with fitting held in place by bolts twice the size of hockey pucks.
At the heart of the overgrown Carrie mill is an incongruous presence rising from the roof of a small concrete block building. It is a 40-foot deer's head sculpted in mesh made of metal tubing, heavy gauge wire, rusted pipes and woven rubber hose proudly looking past the trio of furnaces and the smokestack nearby.
Finding it here without any forewarning would be like stumbling upon an ancient temple in a jungle. It springs from the building below as though it had been growing for centuries. Its nose reaches into the air; its ears are set at the species trademark angle, signaling both timidity and grace.
In this setting, it also acts like a trickster in a Chuck Jones Warner Brothers cartoon. Its 20-foot antlers lie on the ground, being readied by five of the ten-or-so energetic call them "guerrilla," if you will artists who have been working on the noble bust every Sunday since last November. Most are part of Pittsburgh's Industrial Arts Co-op (IAC), centered in the Brew House (2100 Mary St.), a gallery and living space on the city's South Side. The deer is the most ambitious of the projects initiated by the collective, which came together informally in the early 1990s. It is the group's second major clandestine installation at the Carrie Furnace works. The first was a large sculpture of an owl, situated inside one of the mill's abandoned buildings.
"I just kind of stumbled onto (the site)," said defacto ringleader Tim Kaulen, relaxing during a recent Sunday construction session. "In the late 80s when they were tearing down the J. & L. steel mill, I started visiting that site a lot. We spent a lot of time documenting the surroundings as they were taken apart by the phases of demolition.
"It eventually turned into an activity where we were physically interacting with the spaces as opposed to just visiting them. We were trying to activate something to leave behind as a... just an activity within the space."
(As of press time, this article represents the only public acknowledgement the artists have made of their secret sculpting.)
At first site, the deer is a contradictory image. It is made entirely of materials harvested at the site, yet it is camouflaged.
In the simplest of terms, a deer image was chosen because the animals have become a common site at the Carrie Furnace as nature reasserts itself. But the choice resonates more deeply. For one, the site is located in an area that was once the hunting ground for Native Americans who probably killed deer that were ancestors to these new tenants. For another, the deer symbolizes nature taking the space back. Flora and fauna are currently savoring a sweet victory over man's recent dominance. Visually, the animal is an enigmatic and spiritual symbol, as well.
"(We're) sort of giving it back, in a way," said Liz Hammond. "Those materials are lent a whole other purpose than what they were originally formed (for). This was taking and forming it back into something...that was straight from nature—the deer."
The mill's geometric, angular shapes, created from the rounded elements of nature, are once again reordered in the gracefully organic shapes of nature. Depending on how you look at it, the deer's creators are either returning things to square one or opening chapter three of this complex story. Either way, they are interpreting a site - one that carries with it considerable historical, political and cultural baggage in a contemporary language and context.
The Carrie Furnace deer is one of a myriad of works created by regional artists addressing the cultural impact of Pittsburgh's steel industry crash. Another project is proposed for the former site of the Homestead Steel Works, just across the Monongahela River from the Carrie Furnace. Though joined by a corroding railroad bridge, the two riverbank sites couldn't be more different. Nor could the tactics of the projects' sponsors. Running four miles along the riverside's Route 837, the former Homestead Works is now nothing more than a couple of giant, sanitized warehouse buildings and a historic pump house, water tower and steel press. They are located willy-nilly on a field of clipped grass and leveled gravel and mill debris, accessed by a wide paved road. The huge, mostly cleared property would make a shopping mall developer salivate.
This is the site of a painful episode in the steel industry's history. In the summer of 1892, at the river's edge, striking workers defeated 300 Pinkerton detectives hired by the Carnegie Steel Co. to impose a lockout at the mill. The battle's issues were at the heart of the 19th-century political and economic theory: ownership of the means of production; the right of workers to organize; and management's responsibility to the community. The incident and its subsequent legal battles have become a cornerstone of American labor history.
The bloody rebellion is documented in the powerful 1993 film The River Ran Red produced by Pittsburgh artist Steffi Domike. The film details the social dynamics, labor conditions and strike that led to Carnegie's clamp down, and its aftermath.
Domike and the Battle of Homestead Commemorative Site Committee. which includes historians, labor figures, preservationists, architects and artists, are attempting to convince the current owner, the Park Corporation (owner, as well, of the Carrie Furnace) to allow the committee to interpret the site in accordance with its historical significance rather than according to one proposal - turn it into a shopping center with a commemorative tourist attraction attached.
"Part of what we've been trying to do is have these things seen as part of our cultural heritage, which we should maintain and then interpret," Domike said after a tour and conference in the pump house in mid-September. "The issue of interpretation, obviously, is very important."
Domike believes it is an issue of art, not architecture. "(Interpretation) affects the way we think about our world. It's an ideological issue."
Interestingly, the Park Corp. has invested a half million dollars to restore the pump house before deciding the site's eventual fate. Its future has hung in the balance for more than a decade. Domike and her cohorts have suggested a small outdoor amphitheater close to the pump house to reinforce the free speech aspect of the 1892 uprising. She and the committee also resist "landscaping" and designing the area with any scheme not reflective of its steel mill history. The group insists, for instance, that the grounds continue to be founded on the slag produced by the former mill.
Central to the committee's plan is the desire to reunite the Homestead site with the community that supported the strikers throughout their trials. Domike fears the shopping mall and theme park-styled memorial would cut the town of Homestead off from its own heritage. With concerns such as these, she and the committee stand for more comprehensive interpretation of the Homestead site. In a way, the Industrial Arts Co-op is doing that, too. Only they're not wading through a lot of red tape.
"What they're doing is trying to interpret that site," said Domike about the IAC's Carrie Furnace deer. "I think that they're guerrillas, in the sense that they just went and moved in...They're not naive in what they're doing. They're challenging the system every bit as much as we are. But we are doing it with the old language and all the tools of labor history, to use that to push for the interpretation that we want to have at this site."
Domike is supportive of the IAC's work, but suggests that the artists' method may offer "less security in the future."
Ultimately, too, the lovely 40-foot deer hiding in the Carrie Furnace site will be seen by far fewer people than the Homestead committee's proposed work. It is a reality that the artists of the IAC accepted from the first time they breached Carrie's security fence. The bottom line is that next to no one will see the work. And it makes little difference to them. The deer has a life of its own as does the site. It is built on the memory of all who have toiled there and the things they have created.
"I think it's about spirit and not to sound too corny, but the fact that we can be here in this place, making this thing seems kind of ridiculous in a way," said IAC sculptor George Davis.
"Sometimes your audience is just life itself," said Kaulen. "Sometimes your motivation is just for the fact that you're here. Sometime, not always, it's just for the mere fact of doing it."
Curtis Schieber is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad living in Columbus, Ohio.
photo caption:
Industrial Arts Co-op
40-Foot Deer Head at Carrie Furnace. This work-in-progress is sculpted with mesh made of metal tubing, heavy gauge wire, rusted pipes and woven rubber hose.
2100 Mary Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
©Copyright 2000,Industrial Arts Collective, LLC
All rights reserved.