Followup for you, on the storied bathtub-art controversy of Petaluma! It all began around eight years ago, with a proposal from the city’s seven-member Public Art Committee — aka, “the least understood, and most harshly criticized, public service committee in town,” in the words of Petaluma’s local paper — to install a riverfront sculpture of five clawfoot bathtubs towering 20 to 25 feet above ground. Some locals were pissed. Like, really pissed. (More on that later.)
And yet, here we are: Many years, a slight location change and a substantial downsizing later, the sculpture is now a reality. It was unveiled last month at a “crowded sunset ceremony” along the Petaluma riverfront. A reporter from the Petaluma Argus-Courier surveyed the scene:
As the Sunday evening sun slowly set over Petaluma’s crowded little H Street pocket park, the mood was as playful and light as the drifting soap bubbles floating through the air.
After years of delays, challenges and changes of location, artist Brian Goggin was clearly feeling good — and perhaps a bit relieved to be finished — as he mingled his way through the crowd of about 325 art-loving and tub-curious Petalumans, who’d gathered to witness and cheer the official dedication of his art piece “Fine Balance.”
“Isn’t this fun?” asked Goggin, looking over the high-spirited throng of artists, city dignitaries and exuberant supporters. “After everything that’s happened, we just wanted this to be a big celebration.”
Glancing up affectionately at the structures commonly known to locals as “The Bathtubs” — a pair of magically animated twin Victorian tubs, romping along on faux-wooden stilts — Goggin added, “I think they’ve earned a party.”
Petaluma Mayor Kevin McDonnell came best-dressed to the party, wearing a “red sash emblazoned with the words, ‘What is art?’ and a ceremonious top hat,” the Argus-Courier reports. The mayor called the new public-art piece “delightful and whimsical,” and asked: “Who doesn’t need a bit of delight and whimsy now and then?”
The city has reportedly dropped at least a quarter million on the art piece so far. And that number is bound to keep going up, because it’s now under 24-hour surveillance from the Petaluma Police Department “to deter vandals,” according to CBS News. From the CBS report:
“Fine Balance” certainly has people talking. Some people love it, some don’t. But some people have turned their negative opinions about it into threats of vandalism — even posting some of those threats online.
That prompted the Petaluma Police Department to bring out their mobile surveillance trailer, which now sits at the site of the project at 1st St. and H St. It monitors activity there, and is in place to deter anyone from acting upon those threats of vandalism, per Petaluma PD.
At its fever pitch, pushback on the bathtub art included a GoFundMe campaign called “Citizens Against Tubs on Stilts” that raised nearly $10,000 on a rally cry that the art was locally irrelevant, potentially unsafe, “inappropriate for the location” and just plain ugly.
Here’s some more fun history for you: Back in 2019, five years into the saga, the project landed in the Bohemian’s “Best of the North Bay” issue, taking the gold for “Best Public Art Dustup.” In the writeup, we called this “starkly steam-punkish” art piece “one of the most divisive happenings Petaluma has witnessed since Highway 101 split the town into west side and east side.”
At the time, we asked: “Will Petaluma once again cave to art critics and pull the plug on the tubs? It’s a real soap opera. We’ll just have to wait and see.” (Now, I have the distinct honor of answering a fellow Bohemian writer from my perch in The Future: Bro. It’s really happening.)
The bathtub art has even secured itself a spot in the digital record of humanity, as the star of a new video game called “Trippin’ on Tubs” — created by software engineer and fifth-generation Petaluman Elliot Barlas, according to the Press Democrat. Kid you not. You can play the game here.
And finally, I bring you a premonition from the SF Chronicle: Bathtub artist Brian Goggin may live to see his original five-tub vision (downsized to two tubs during the citizen uprising) come to fruition, after all. The Chron says:
He’s not giving up on his original plan to build three more bathtubs and install them in a sculpture park to be built on the other side of Petaluma Slough.
“That would create a gateway,” said Goggin, who now likes the pocket park better than he did the original [Water Street promenade] site he fought so hard for.
“I think this location is way better,” he said, noting a defunct cement plant directly across the slough. “We really needed for this to happen without noticing that we needed it to happen.”
Goggin hopes to finance the next phase by constructing 2-foot scale models of the bathtubs, to be sold for $1,500 each.
Meanwhile, in the parallel universe that is Sebastopol, another controversial sculpture eight years in the making was just installed last month in a meadow behind the “Welcome to Sebastopol” sign at the town’s eastern entrance. This one, too — a shimmering, 28-foot tower made from nearly 12,000 tiny pieces of “bio-plastic” — was reportedly forced to relocate and downsize due to outside criticism.
The artist, renowned environmental sculptor Ned Kahn, tells the Sebastopol Times: “We presented it to Caltrans, and they said, well, one of our rules is it can’t have any moving parts. So we fought with them for a year and a half, giving them data to show that the thing is totally safe, but they wouldn’t budge from their rules. It took eight years to navigate the minefield of Caltrans, Open Space and the City of Sebastopol hoops, but we got to the finish line. We had to get the sculpture in before October because of rules about bird migration.”
And yet the Spire has risen, against all odds. See it in action here.
They’re absolutely atrocious and is a black eye on the City of Petaluma! We’ve become a laughing stock of Sonoma County!