1954 (1953) (1955) (1940-1950) (1950-1960) Table of Contents
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1954, 1923 See Text
Christopher Knight Walter Hopps* [1932-2005] Curator Brought Fame to Postwar L.A. Artists, Los Angeles Times, 22/3/05, pp. A1, A19, 2005b See Text
Larry "Leigh" Mace, Muscle Beach, Standing on the flying rings, 1954 See Image
Roger Cardinal Outsider Art Praeger Books: NY, 1972. 1959, 1955, 1954, 1921, 1888 See Text
Documents
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp.
{Don't the Amusement Piers predate the movie lots? Weren't they fantasies of work and travel before the movie lot?}
". . . All the skill, cunning, salesmanship, and technical proficiency are there.
"They are also at diametrical variance with the special brand of 'innocence' that underlies the purely personal fantasies of Los Angeles. Innocence is a word to use cautiously in this context, because it must be understood as not comprising either simplicity or ingenuousness. Deeply imbued with standard myths of the Natural Man and the Noble Savage, as in other parts of the US, this innocence grows and flourishes as an assumed right in the Southern California sun, an ingenious and technically proficient cult of private and harmless gratifications that is symbolized by the surfer's secret smile of intense concentration and the immensely sophisticated and highly decorated plastic surf-board he needs to conduct his private communion with the sea.
"This fantasy of innocence has one totally self-absorbed and perfected monument in Los Angeles, so apt, so true and so imaginative that it has gained the world-wide fame it undoubtedly deserves: Simon Rodia's clustered towers in Watts. Alone of the buildings of Los Angeles they are almost too well know to need description, tapering traceries of coloured pottery shards bedded in cement on frames of scrap steel and baling wire. They are unlike anything else in the world-especially unlike all the various prototypes that have been proposed for them by historians who have never seen them in physical fact. . . .
"And in the thirty-three years of absorbed labour he devoted to their construction, and in his uninhibited ingenuity in exploiting the by-products of an affluent technology, and in his determination to 'do something big', and in his ability to walk away when they were finished in 1954, Rodia was very much at one with the surfers, hot-rodders, sky-divers, and scuba-divers who personify the tradition of private, mechanistic satori-seeking in California. . . ." p. 129
Christopher Knight Walter Hopps* [1932-2005] Curator Brought Fame to Postwar L.A. Artists, Los Angeles Times, 22/3/05, pp. A1, A19
Hopps and his wife regularly held informal exhibitions in their Brentwood apartment, where occasional sales helped keep them afloat. He briefly operated a galllery housed in a small structure built from used telephone poles. Called Syndell Studios, it was named in memory of a farmer who was killed in a freak accident while Hopps was driving cross-country. At Syndell Studos, Hopps showed the seminal Beat generation artist, Wallace Berman, and he met Herms.
" . . .
Larry "Leigh" Mace, Muscle Beach, Standing on the flying rings, 1954
Roger Cardinal Outsider Art Praeger Books: NY, 1972. 1959, 1955, 1954, 1921, 1888
Simon Rodia (1879-
"Watts is a sprawling suburb of Los Angeles, a drab and dusty accumulation of one-storey houses and vacant lots. Above East 107 Street, a short street that runs between two railroad tracks, three tall spires soar upwards, the highest rising to something like one hundred feet. They are skeletal structures formed by interlinked rings that create a dense, fantastc tracery. Several smaller spires accompany them, all being incrusted with a gaily coloured mosaic of broken china, glass and shells. Around the triangular lot runs a six-foot scalloped wall. From inside, the towers are seen to be connected by overhead arches and spokes; stalagmites, fountains, birdbaths, loggias and benches rise out of a flor of slabs of red, brown and green cement marked with flower- and heart-shaped patterns. The inside wall and all other available surfaces are covered in sea-shells, green 7-Up bottles, broken cups and the like, or with cement that bears the impression made by hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, scrap ironwork, corncobs, cookie moulds, sewing-machine parts, and the rosette-shaped handle of an old tap. The surrounding wall is high enough to dismiss the outer world from one's consciousness; the array of disparate parts take on an exhilarating coherence and forms a harmonious space set apart, a closed garden which nourishes the sense of wonderment and refuses the ordinariness of its suburban context.
"The creator of the Watts Towers is an uneducated Italian workman, Simon Rodia, who was taken to the United States in about 1888, while still a child. After doing jobs as a logger, miner and construction worker, he went to Los Angeles to work as a tile-setter and telephone repair-man, buying a house in Watts. He was a simple unschooled man, whose leisure time was spent reading odd volumes of an old Encyclopedia Britannica, from which he derived an admiration for figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Buffalo Bill. It is possible that these heroes inspired him to seek a way to leave his own mark in life or, as he once put it, "to do something big." In 1921 he began to build in his garden, having, so he claimed, acquired a building permit issued by the state capital Sacramento, Los Angeles haing refused. Without plans, without machinery, without scaffolding, Rodia set ot work, erecting steel rods, meshing wire round them, and adding waterproof cement to form a powerful armature. First he constructed a twenty-five foot tower of interconnected hoops; then he started again at the bottom and built another structure around the first, carrying the tower up twenty feet higher, and so on. The hoops were close enough together for him to climb up without a ladder, with a window-washer's belt for safety and a bucket of cement. Rodia had no assistance. "I was a poor man," he is quoted as saying. "Had to do a little at a time. Nobody helped me. I think if I hire a man he don't know what to do. A million times I don't know what to do myself." Apart from the cement, Rodia bought none of his materials and relied on what he could pick up from the neighbourhood. He would go for walks at night with an empty cement sack on his shoulder, gathering bottles and other bits and pieces; the railroad gave him some rusty old rails, and at weekends he would take the tram to Long Beach and gather shells. For thirty-three years he carried on his work, and then, in 1954, before the garden was properly finished, he abruptly called a halt, signed his property away to a neighbour and disappeared. For years the property lay uncared for, vandals threw stones at the towers, and parts of the mosaic were smashed. (A rumour had it that money was hidden behind the plates in the wall.) In 1955 the house burned down, and thereafter the garden turned more and more into a rubbish dump. However, by 1959 a number of people had become interested in the Towers and were resolved to preserve them, despite a threat by the city to demolish what it saw as illegal and dangerous structures. After a long-drawn dispute the committee set up to defend the Towers agreed to an engineering test to ascertain whether they were safe or not. When subjected to strain equivalent to a 70 m.p.h. wind, the reinforced concrete did not budge, and the city's case was lost. Since then the garden has been cleaned up, and declared a Culture Heritage Monument.
"But are the Watts Towers a "cultural" work in the sense of a contribution to a felt tradition? The engineering test at least assures their endurance, but the fact that the garden has been opened to the public is no guarantee that the work really "belongs to a collective heritage. It may be doubted whether the varied reactions that people have are of any relevance to the original intention that underlay the creation of the Towers. Some visitors have said that the triangular slip of land with its three "masts" feels like a ship. Others are attentive to the rumour that Rodia's wife lies buried underneath the tallest tower, and like to imagine that the Towers are a monument to a woman's memory. Yet others have wanted to see the Towers as a tribute to California, Rodia's new homeland, though Rodia's work could just as well be envisaged as a violent reaction against it, or at least to the immediate area of Watts. It might be held that the Towers are a challenge to a triviality and ugliness, a "something big" that is not mimetic of American bigness, but a brilliant alternative to it in the way it exploits the very things that America discards. The only inscription to be found are the Spanish words "Nuestro Pueblo", repeated several times, notably on the main gate and the principal tower. The experession has been variously construed as "Our Town" or "Our People", and as a reminiscence of the original name of the city, El Pueblo Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. Yet rather than reinforce the sense of its kinship with that city, the naming of the garden in this way could equally draw attention to its separateness-it is Our Town as against Their Town. That is, the name may imply a gesture of dissociation, of solitary withdrawal. The highwalls around the lot confirm its separatist autonomy: the place could be defended like a fort!
"As for Rodia himself, he was finally traced by members of the Towers Committee, who found him living in a bedsitter in Martinez, three hundred-odd miles to the north. But they were unable to get anything much out of him by way of a statement of intention. the old man preferred to discuss politics. When pressed to explain the name Nuestro Pueblo, he replied evasively that it means "lot-sa things, lot-sa things." Why had he left Watts? The only satisfactory reason that emerged was that he was tired of being harrassed by vandals. It was noted that he never mentioned having finished the work. Though courteous, Rodia at all time remained indifferent to the enthusiasm of his admirers, and the one striking statement he made was that he was not interested in going back to see his work: "Don't you understand? It's the end; there's nothing there." Our curiosity about the Towers seems dillettantish in the face of such perfect renunciation." pp. 171-172