A Snapshot of Cosmic Steel

I shot a five minute video today at my steel fab shop/studio. On Friday I finished, with some help, putting together COSMOS, a large wind sculpture I made in 2004. It has been lying around my shop yard disassembled since it came back from being rented for a movie. I finally cleared a space and put it together. It was breezy today and it moved beautifully in the wind. I just had to shoot some photos and video. There are some other in-progress and completed worksin the video, too. I apologize for the clutter in my shop. I guess I work in creative chaos.
To see the video, go to my Cosmic Steel website

Queen Califia's Magical Circle

During my California trip in March, 2009, I visited an absolutely amazing art environment in Kit Carson Park in Escondido. It's called Queen Califia's Magical Circle. Opened to the public in 2003, this is the last major international work designed by sculptor and mosaic artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

The Magical Circle is about 90 feet in diameter and every inch is covered in mosaic. Materials include iridescent glass, pebbles, slices of agate, ceramic tiles, and semi-precious stones. The substructure consists of steel and polystyrene foam covered in fiberglass.

The walled circle has gigantic mosaic snakes around the perimeter. You enter the sculpture garden via a walled maze of black, white, and mirrored tiles. You exit the maze into a courtyard containing several totem-pole like sculptures. In the very center of the circle is a giant bird that you can walk under. In the space under the giant bird is a golden egg. On top of the bird stands Queen Califia, holding a small bird in her hand.

Niki named the installation after a legendary black Amazon queen who ruled over the mythical island of California. The roots of this legend date back to a Spanish novel written in 1510. Some people think that California (the U.S. state) was named after this legend.

Before she got into mosaic, Niki made a splash in the international art world with her "shooting paintings." She would embed full paint cans in plaster sculptures, put a blank canvas behind them and shoot the sculptures with a gun, splattering the paint on the canvas.

When visiting Barcelona, she was profoundly influenced by the work of Antoni Gaudi's Guell Park. This experience launched her into the world of mosaic.

Her largest work, the Tarot Garden, took 20 years to build and was completed in 1998. The Tarot Garden is in Italy but, in the U.S., the San Diego area has several of her works on display. Queen Califia's Magical Circle is the largest and most spectacular of her artworks in the United States. See more photos.

East Jesus Expands

A little over two years ago Charlie Russell moved out to a corner of Slab City to create a habitable, extensible art installation that he calls East Jesus. Shortly after he arrived, I visited him for about a month and helped a little with his growing project. I made a 15-minute video of this experience which I put online. I visited again in March of 2009 and the installation has expanded impressively.

Charlie is the "mayor" of East Jesus. He started by having an old shipping container delivered to the site. In 2007 I and a couple of friends helped start a sculpture garden using the junk that is lying around the place. As of my most recent trip, his installation now includes two travel trailers, several rooms built between the trailers and the shipping container, raised-bed gardens and the sculpture garden has been fenced and more sculptures added.

He has built a music room complete with a grand piano. The walls are covered with found-object art. He has begun a fantastic bottle wall using wine bottles and mortar. There is an LED light in the open end of each of the bottles so, at night, the wall looks spectacular.

Charlie's French friend, Segolene, was there when I arrived. She and Charlie both like to cook so we ate some delicious meals. It was quite a pleasant contrast to be sitting amidst the junk-turned-art right next to a military bombing range eating gourmet cuisine by the ambient light of the LED bottle wall.

A few days before I left, A Canadian musician, Natasha Duchene, arrived to record an album with Charlie as the recording engineer and guest musician. She writes music, sings, and plays the piano.

I added a few more sculptures to the garden on this trip as well as helping Charlie build some raised platforms to hang out on and watch the sun set. See a set of photos here.

The next installment of this blog will blow your mind. Check back in a week or so to read about, and see pictures of, an awesome mosaic environment.

Slab City Tank Art

I just completed a two-week trip to Southern California in search of interesting art installations. This is the first of a series reports on what I found on this trip. The first installment is about two large murals painted on some concrete tanks at the abandoned military base now known as Slab City.

The concrete tanks are about 100 feet in diameter and maybe 12 feet high. They probably were water tanks. A year and a half ago a guy started painting murals on them. One of the tanks looks like it is finished and the other one is in progress. I thought the artwork was spectacular.

The finished tank has a sexuality theme. The artwork is layered with the background layer consisting of the Kama Sutra positions. On top of that are dancing people with animal faces and also a ring of people holding hands. There are also a lot of small animals depicted in sexual positions.

The other tank is not done yet. So far it has dinosaurs in the background with various weapons being painted on top.

I met the artist and his idea is to create something outrageous. I believe he is succeeding. This has to be one of the only places in the country where someone can get away with creating such a major and controversial work of art. He seems quite unattached to the finished murals and welcomes graffiti artists to come out and add to the work. He refuses to be photographed and doesn't want anyone to know who made the art.

I'd love to go back in about a year and see what the tanks look like then. Click here to see more photos.

Zone Trip 9

On Saturday, Feb. 21, 2009, over 20 people gathered in a secret desert location for Zone Trip #9 - Destruction in the Zone of Mass Destruction. The purpose was to commemorate the end of analog television broadcasting. About 30 old picture-tube-style televisions and a couple of computer monitors were gathered by the participants and creatively destroyed in a somewhat spectacular fashion. The next day it was all swept into piles, loaded into trucks, and hauled to the dump, leaving no trace of the chaos. See a 2-minute video of the mayhem.

There is something about the love/hate relationship people have with TV that prompts a few of them to smash them. There are a number of short videos online showing people smashing individual TV's. A few videos show more coordinated efforts involving large numbers of televisions.

The seminal event that spurred a lot of television abuse was a 1975 film short called Media Burn. An art collective called the Ant Farm produced this video as a parody and critique of modern media. The film concluded with a modified 1959 Cadillac driving through a flaming wall of TV's. I recently found a YouTube video with an excerpt from the film.

I suspect this groundbreaking (and TV breaking) event inspired at least one other similar event. In 1982 The Plasmatics made a music video for their song "The Damned" where they upped the ante by driving a school bus through a wall of televisions.

One year later, in 1983, Godfrey Reggio created a movie called Koyaanisqatsi which has a sequence in it of a wall of televisions being destroyed. I don't have any evidence to suggest that he was inspired by the Ant Farm or the Plasmatics but the timing suggests that the previous videos could have been an influence. I don't have a clip of this one.

This is the end of an era. Television equipment has changed. The old style pictures tubes pop explosively when smashed which is particularly satisfying. Today's TV's no longer use big, heavy, glass vacuum tubes. These new types of screens won't be near as much fun to smash.

Glass in the Desert

Although this is a "mainstream" attraction, the Dale Chihuly glass exhibition at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix,AZ was so uniquely beautiful that I wanted to share it with you. There was really a lot of blown glass artistically placed in the gardens amidst the plants. The best part about it, for me, was how it fit in and enhanced the gardens. The shiny, brightly colored glass pieces added a surreal feel to the desert and, although temporary, is reminiscent of some of the outsider art environments that I described in my previous blog post. The exhibition will be at the Desert Botanical Gardens until May, 2009 See more photos.

Building a Visionary Environment

For many years my wife, Nita, and I have had the dream of building a habitable, sculptural art environment. An art environment (also called a visionary environment) is a permanent, large-scale, art installation that reflects the visions and inspirations of the people that have created it. There are many of these around the world mostly hidden away in rural areas where neighbors were unlikely to complain.

The photo above is one of the structures at Eliphante - an art environment in Cornville, Arizona.

Most of the environments of the past were created by dedicated, even obsessed, individuals who spent upwards of 20 years building them. Many of the creators were unschooled in the arts and some did not even think that what they created was art.

One of the most famous examples of a visionary art environment is Watts Towers, in Los Angeles, CA. It was built over 33 years by Simon (Sam) Rodia. He built tall towers out of re-bar and scrap wire that he found and then cemented them with shells, broken 7-Up bottles, broken dishes and other bits of colored pottery that he found. The only thing he had in mind was "to build something big." When it was done, he gave the property to a neighbor and moved away, never to return.

In the 1959 the City of Los Angeles declared the towers unsafe and tried to pull them down. They couldn't do it. The towers were too well-built. The only thing that happened was some of the mosaic pieces popped off. The site was saved from the wrecking ball and, now, Watts Towers is the smallest National Monument in the United States - 1/10 of an acre.

An example of a religiously inspired environment is Salvation Mountain. Leonard Knight has poured and painted over 100,000 gallons of paint on a mud hillside for over 20 years. He has sculpted caverns out of hay bales, tree trunks, and painted adobe. The whole hillside is covered with religious slogans revolving around the idea, "God is Love."

Salvation Mountain, near Niland, CA, was begun in the mid 1980's when Knight decided that was the place to build his monument to God. Sometime in the 1990's the site was declared a toxic hazard and seemed destined for destruction. In 2002 it was entered in the Congressional Record as a National Treasure. Leonard, now in his late 70's, can be found painting on his mountain most days during the winter months.

A few art environments are the work of inspired sophisticates, rather than art world outsiders. The Tarot Garden, in Italy was created by Niki de Saint Phalle, a famous mosaic artist. Along with another well-known artist, Jean Tinguely, she created a garden of gigantic mosaic covered structures that represent the major Arcana of the Tarot Deck.

The Tarot Garden was begun in 1979. During much of the construction Niki lived inside the Empress, one of the largest sculptures. The site was opened to the public in 1998 after almost 20 years of work. Niki de Saite Phalle has created sculpture gardens internationally. One of them is in Escondido, California - Queen Califia's Magical Circle. Niki died in 2002.

THIS IS OUR DREAM - to begin building a habitable, expanding environment of whimsical buildings, gardens, pavilions, and sculptures. We need a place to build it. We are hoping there is someone out there with 3 or more acres of flat-ish land that they can spare, in a location somewhere in the Western U.S. that has good rainfall, soil, and growing season for gardening. It would be a plus for the site to be within or near a progressive, artistic community that would be supportive of our efforts or, at least, not complain about having something unusual in their midst.

The photo at left is a garden gate Royce welded together out of found objects. See more of Royce's steel work at Cosmic Steel.

We expect that it will take 20 or more years to achieve the scale and wonder that could turn the site into a destination for the public. With our combined artistic and construction skills - Nita with concrete and mosaic and myself with steel, I know we can create something grand and unusual. We hope our creations will also make people smile and maybe even be uplifting or inspiring to others.

The photo at right is Nita's latest project - a mosaic wall on the roof deck of The Raven Cafe, in Prescott, AZ. See more of Nita's concrete and mosaic work here.

To read more about our dream, about us, and about how you may be able to help, Click Here.