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 floor 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 having refused. Without plans, without machinery, without scaffolding, Rodia set to 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 there after 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 expression 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