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A few feet from the Seattle Art Museum's $85 million Olympic Sculpture Park, currently under construction, at least a hundred wood and stone sculptures line the waterfront: rocks stacked on top of each other, wooden beams balanced on rock tips with rocks on top of them, rocks nestled into the curve of larger rocks, all rising like a ragged army of standing and fallen soldiers.
They look as if they belong at Myrtle Edwards Park, and they do. The artist who built them, a homeless man known to his friends as Stacker, used only materials on the site, rearranging the ordinary into art.
What John Cage said about music is true of art: Art happens all the time; we only see it some of the time.
Short, muscular and lithe in his movements with clear blue eyes and thick, wiry red hair curling out from under his cap, Stacker prefers to remain a mystery. He gives his age, 40, but not his real name and says politely, when asked about it, that he wants to keep his personal story to himself.
He'll say this: He's been on the road since he was 13. He works as a day laborer when he needs the money, but would rather make art.
"Sometimes I paint houses," he said. "Sometimes I dig ditches, and sometimes I'm a roofer. I'm art all the time."
People have always made things out of driftwood and rocks, shaped like animals, mountains, small castles or the heads of loved ones.
Stacker's art comes from this universal tradition yet is unique to him.
He starts by stacking rocks, a common practice used to mark trails in Japan, best known in Seattle by the late George Tsutakawa's tribute to it, which he carved in wood and called obos.
Tsutakawa's softly rounded stacked sculptures don't look like Stacker's. Stacker's are rougher, with an uncanny internal grace and delicate but jaunty balance between heavy and light materials. Each sculpture is a marvel, and they resonate in each other's company.
What makes a ragged rock stand on the edge of a boulder, steady in such a seemingly precarious position?
"OK," he said, grinning. "I'm going to tell you like it is. I don't know."
Watching him work, it's clear he feels his way into the balance, staring at the point of contact and lifting his hand away when the connection between forms feels like a fusion.
Stacker says he drifted into town five weeks ago and found his way to the waterfront. He began his rock/wood piles around that time, and he thinks park workers knocked down his first efforts because of the crowds expected for Fourth of July fireworks.
Having his slate wiped clean turned into an inspiration. He redoubled his efforts, making the first wave of sculptures look rudimentary and partial.
"When I make art, I go for the zone. I can feel it when I'm there, like a surfer on a wave."
Some rocks he piles into short pillars along the shoreline. Others he turns into circles in the grass, like English sculptor Richard Long's rock circles, only smaller, a few with a faint indentation that might be a heart.
He likes seeing the Olympic Sculpture Park take shape.
"Lots of pennies over there," he said. "No pennies here."
Just north of where he's working stands Michael Heizer's "Adjacent, Against, Upon," three huge granite slabs that seem to be in procession, resting beside, against and upon concrete slabs.
"This morning I caressed those rocks," he says. "I like them a lot, not the concrete pedestals as much, even though I know why he used them, to tip the rocks up and set them off. Seems like he could have found another way, seeing as he's working on the waterfront and everything is natural out here. ..."
Permanence of any kind seems remote to him. He knows his waterfront sculptures won't last more than a season, and he'll move on.
"When they're gone, they'll still be beautiful," he said, "like a trash can with yesterday's newspaper inside it."
What he'd really like is to have a Web site. He'd take pictures of his art and save it online.
Seattle's a high-tech city, I said. A Web site doesn't sound like an impossible dream.
"That's me," he said. "High tech. I can't wait."
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