The `Fire' this time: No more flame excuses to douse artist

Art review

"At the Crossroads: A Fire Ceremony," on the International Fountain Lawn, Seattle Center, at 7 p.m. Sunday. Related entertainment begins at 4 p.m.

Carl Smool and his phantasmagoria of fire and symbolism are back. Or they will be on Sunday.

Smool is the Seattle artist whose long-planned New Year's Eve fire ceremony at Seattle Center was canceled after Seattle Center administration decided that leaping flames on the center lawn were inappropriate in the wake of the WTO riots and fears of a terrorist bomb threat.

Though Smool had been planning "At the Crossroads: A Fire Ceremony" for more than a year, it was postponed, disappointing Smool and thousands of people who'd written their dreams and prayers for the new millennium on small slips of paper to be burned during the ceremony as a symbolic offering of hope and goodwill.

But this week Smool and a team of carpenters and artists have been putting the finishing touches on 17 wood and papier-mache sculptures, some as large as 17 feet tall. At 7 p.m. Sunday the sculptures, all on wheels, will be arranged on the lawn near the center fountain and set aflame. Because of the size of the statues, Smool estimates the pyrotechnics will last about an hour.

Smool is known in Seattle for temporary and always highly theatrical public art installations. At Bumbershoot in 1997, he orchestrated a fire ceremony involving the burning of seven "demons" he had made. He's also made giant carnival-style figures for parades and processions, and created over-the-top decorations for gala events at the Henry Art Gallery, among other places.

He says he got the idea for the fire ceremony from a festival that started in the Middle Ages in Valencia, Spain. To honor their patron saint, St. Joseph, members of the carpenters' guild would use scrap wood to build fantastic sculptures, which they then burned as offerings on St. Joseph's Day, March 19. Sunday is also the spring equinox.

"Over time the sculptures became larger and more complicated," said Smool, who traveled to Valencia last year to observe the event, now called Fallas de Valenica, or "follies of Valencia."

"Now artists make the sculptures and I visited their studios," said Smool. "Some of what they make is quite fantastic. They're 75 to 80 feet tall, and over 600 of them get built and placed around the city for a week ahead of time. Then they're all burned within a few hours."

In Valencia, the sculptures are often of political figures or designed to point out some societal foible. But Smool designed his sculptures as animals and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There is also a very large egg-shaped sculpture that will be the centerpiece of the ceremony.

"When I originally got the idea in 1998," said Smool, "I thought that a big fire celebration would be a great way to note the passage of time from one millennium to another." Big planned fires, including bonfires, are usually built to get rid of the old and unwanted and make space for the new, said Smool.

But to add more associative imagery to his ceremony, Smool decided that animal sculptures representing the species of the Earth would be arranged around the egg, representing the life force. The Four Horsemen, representing conquest, war, famine and death, are on the perimeter as reminders of humanity's fearsome ability to inflict danger and peril on itself.

The 10,000 wishes and prayers written by visitors to Seattle Center over the past year will be stuffed into the sculptures. Each sculpture will be lit electronically by a 12-volt battery. The immolations will occur one at a time in a choreography that should take about half an hour, Smool said. But since each sculpture takes a while to completely burn, the fire will stay lit for at least 45 minutes. Slides will be projected onto sculptures while they're burning.

Perry Cooper, Seattle Center spokesman, said the ceremony was canceled on New Year's Eve "because at that time it was inappropriate because of the events surrounding the WTO and the terrorist threat. We just didn't feel that a fire in the downtown area could be comfortably interpreted by the city. Now we believe the tenseness has been reduced. And with the spring equinox, it's an ideal time."

Just like the carpenters of medieval Valencia, Smool used recycled, cast-off wood and cardboard for the sculptures.

"Broadly, the ceremony says that we're at a crossroads in society and in time," said Smool, "but the perils are more dangerous than they ever have been. We now have the ability to wipe every living creature off the Earth. We need to choose very carefully how we behave and live in the future. The stakes are very high."