Artifact: A performance installation
December 13, 2003
Vain salon, retail store and studios
2016-2018 First Avenue, Seattle WA
Artifact was made possible by a 2003 Vain Free-Thinking Fellowship

How do we assign value to material culture (objects, clothing, buildings, documentation) in our society?
How does our sensory experience confirm or conflict with what we have learned makes an object meaningful?
Artifact presented these questions in a one-night performance, audio and object installation based on the fictional history of a mock floor artifact ostensibly recovered during a routine sewer repair in front of Vain in 2001.
Participants confronted their own definitions of authenticity and value in a series of rooms filled with contradictory correspondence, mock-aged material evidence, live impersonators and eye-witness recordings and authoritative documents.

Elements in Artifact:
Personal correspondence from university archives; an audio interview with Sly Strutinski, the utilities crew member who discovered the floor; excerpted findings of Olsen and Schiller, historical consultants in charge of the excavation, compiled for the Seattle Office of Urban Archaeology in November 2001; the excavated floor protected by a uniformed security guard and roped stanchions; the excavated pillowcase attributed to Anabell Notch, reformed prostitute and supposed matron of the home for reforming prostitutes; a believed photograph of Anabell Notch; the curator's studio with documentation of the floor; Soiled Dove impersonators roaming the building

Before entering the rooms, each visitor received a scroll with the following text:

The story of the floor began for me when I came to Vain for a tour of the studio space offered with the fellowship. Mysterious and tantalizing, its dirtied designs were protected by a thick, nearly unbroken coat of wax that had endured a century of tectonic shifts and subterranean leaks. I could have just as well been standing in the innermost sanctums of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hovering dazed behind the plexi glass case that holds me from reading ancient hieroglyphics like gilded Braille across the sarcophagus of a great Pharaoh. Where did this thing come from, who made it, and why? And, why was it piled in the corner of an empty studio next to an equally soiled pillowcase and some antique radiators?

Created sometime between 1901 and 1904, the floor was part of a transitional home for prostitutes that stood on the Vain property between sometime in late 1900, after the First Avenue regrade, and sometime before 1909, when the Vogue Hotel, in which we now stand, was erected. The first of its kind in Washington State, the home was run by former prostitute Anabell Notch, whose secret pact with the Washington Women's Christian Temperance Union provided funding for the home where these soiled doves got back on their feet before being placed in new lives, sometimes jobs and sometimes marriage, far from Seattle reputations. Not only was the home the only such place in Washington State at the time, but also the only one ever documented to have been run by a lady who knew both the ins and how to get out of the business. The images of ovaries and kidneys, hand-written papers and traces of human hair embedded in the floor's surface seem to implicate it in some sort of symbolic or actual healing process specific to the situation of the women. How and why the floor was buried when the Vogue Hotel was built remains a mystery.

Our own little artifact was how Vain VP Norma Straw introduced the floor to me. A Seattle Public Utilities worker found it during a routine sewer repair under the sidewalk in front of Vain in May of 2001. Olsen and Schiller, a historical consulting firm hired by the City to excavate the site, recovered additional floor remnants and an old pillowcase. The Seattle Office of Urban Archaeology decided the findings didn't merit a home in a museum, and turned it over to Vain, because they owned the property where it was found and hence owned the floor. Norma liked it enough to keep it in one of the vacant studios on the third floor.

Mesmerized by the colors and textures, I wondered what it was that gave an object its value? Why was it that an old floor could get me so hot and strike not even a chord of intrigue in those whose job it is to identify and preserve valuable material culture? How do we measure the difference in value between a Mona Lisa that I form out of poster trash on a utility pole, a framed print of her, the real painting and a torn magazine reproduction of her skin that glistens in a puddle of sun-light sewer sludge? These questions formed my application for the Vain fellowship and the start of five months of chasing history through City offices, libraries, museums, the University of Washington, the Internet and Seattle streets. The materials I've found are assembled where their story began, in a place that continues to give people an opportunity to define their own beauty, their own value.

Diana Falchuk
December 13, 2003