Outsider Art by Daniel Wojcik

Author:Daniel Wojcik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

Sabato Rodia and the Watts Towers

For decades, similar assumptions have been applied to the internationally known Watts Towers, an art environment created by Sam (Simon) Rodia in South Central Los Angeles. Rodia (1879–1965), born Sabato Rodia in the village of Rivottoli Serino, east of Naples, Italy, created a complex of seventeen structures, including three spectacular and ornate spires. The tallest, measuring ninety-nine and a half feet in height, is made of interwoven steel rods wrapped with wire mesh, then covered in cement and decorated with a colorful mosaic of found objects, including glass, porcelain, ceramic tiles, and sea shells. A scalloped wall covered with mosaic surrounds the environment. Inside, in addition to the three large towers, are four smaller towers, a gazebo, fountains, birdbaths, benches, walkways, gardens, and a boat covered in mosiac. Rodia’s towers are considered to be the largest structures ever made by a single human being working alone. As an essential part of the vernacular architectural landscape of Los Angeles, his towers have inspired individuals ranging from Ed Kienholz and Betye Saar to Niki de Saint Phalle, Don DeLillo, and Charles Mingus (who lived a block away from the towers and watched Rodia construct them with admiration).3 Buckminster Fuller was another admirer, who claimed that Rodia was “one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century,” an intuitive genius with an innate understanding of design and the principles of engineering (Goldstone and Goldstone, 1997: 3–5, 39, 50; Landler and Byer, 2006).

Like the postman Cheval, Rodia worked alone on his structures, apparently every day for thirty-three years, using sophisticated techniques of construction involving mortar, mesh, inlaid objects, and plenty of steel. He also was a master of bricolage, like Cheval, creatively harnessing whatever materials were at hand. Rodia, Cheval, Hampton, Finster, Chand, and other builders of art environments such as Raymond Isidore, Helen Martins, and Tressa Prisbrey embody the concept of the bricoleur as a do-it-yourself inventor, a resourceful jack-of-all trades creating with scrap, leftovers, and odds and ends. When discussing the ways that mythologies are constructed, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss specifically refers to Cheval and his Palais as an illustration of the concept of bricolage, the process by which an individual creator with limited resources uses available materials in new ways and creates things from miscellaneous objects salvaged from a variety of sources (1966: 18–19). Rodia drew upon the materials that were available to him too—broken pottery, tiles, glass, shells—and skillfully reused these cast-off objects in inventive ways, giving them new meanings in his stunning sculptural displays.

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