 Brother Ted’s Hippie House: a Grassroots Art Environment Niagara Falls, NY, a perfect bright sunny day. We pulled over beside the infamous Hippie House at Hyde Park Boulevard and Maple Avenue, into the vestiges of the bygone. The eye could not immediately make sense of what it was seeing: a shambles of eclectic junk growing in clusters from a dilapidated house and surrounding it. Wicker furniture festooned with faded plastic flowers and tangled cords, rain-weary plush toys, a filthy Mickey Mouse in pink sunglasses. There was a bouncy horse with rusty springs, broken Christmas balls, old clocks, a weathered Wurly heaped in kitchen clutter and bicycle tire tubes, makeshift crosses propped with sports netting and batik bandanas, buckets overflowing with warped vinyl and forlorn evergreen boughs, striped orange pylons rumpled psychedelic granny square Afghans strewn amongst vines and unruly grasses. A faded Spiderman mask stared up at me from a wheelbarrow grave. The rickety house looked like it might blow over from the mildest rustle of breeze. It was covered on every side in murals and graffiti. I started snapping photos of sticks shrouded in mangy t-shirts, of leaned mirrors reflecting the blue sky, of a pillar or bricks painted crudely with what might be Frank Zappa, when a small voice from the rubble caught me off guard. I turned toward the faint hello and was startled to see a small and shirtless old man on a refuse throne. Slight, sinewy, he clambered down from his camouflage and extended a sun-bronzed hand toward me. Ted, he said politely, so I introduced myself. He kissed my hand. Ted assured me that it was okay to photograph the yard, with the caveat that I didn’t capture him in any of the pictures. It turned out that I had already captured him in one photo, before he spoke up, but I didn’t know until later. Out of respect at his request, I have kept this image to myself. My friend’s mother drove me to this destination, knowing I would be curious about the weird world on Maple Avenue. I was wading blind through the junk heaps with no context whatsoever for what I was seeing. I told Ted that I was visiting from Toronto, and he asked immediately about some concerts there before my time, told me how he crossed the border on numerous occasions to visit the record shops that were once a Yonge Street mecca. I said I had worked at Sam the Record Man when I was twenty or not even, and his eyes lit up. I learned more later. The junk lot was legendary in these parts, home of Zoundz Music, the house barely standing, where Ted still lived. Music aficionados flocked here for concert tickets and bootleg recordings, a destination in the days you flipped through vinyl albums in milk crates for obscure treasures of sound. I felt a terrible weight of loneliness emanating from this strange and sweet character, but it might have been all illusion. All the locals knew Ted. He could get you a scratchy bootleg of any performance you wanted or hook you up with new records, Jethro Tull, the Grateful Dead. While many folks recoiled at the mess of it all, most remembered Ted and Zoundz with loyal reverence. I found countless comments on Facebook noting his legendary kindness. “Brother Ted,” they called him. “Nice guy.” “Ted is awesome, a really good guy.” “He got me tickets for BB King.” “Got tickets to my first concert from Ted.” Long past his heyday, nostalgia abounded. “He loved his Dr. Pepper!” “I used to shop there all the time. Fantastic vinyl. I bought a bunch of Pink Floyd bootlegs there.” People shared his obsession for music and respect for his knowledge. One commenter mentioned that Ted was so diehard, he even got married at Woodstock. Other comments lamented that Ted should have “laid off the LSD.” Before Zoundz, the same yard overflowing with timeworn detritus of culture was a hangout for The Animals, a local group of motorcycle bikers. There was apparently a huge pet pig. Before that, it was a gas station. If most of us want manicured lawns and a button down way of life, others live outside of that paradigm in another realm that doesn’t answer to societal expectations. Ted’s world is Ted’s alone, but yards and gardens arranged in ways that colour outside the lines abound across the North American map. They are sometimes called outsider or visionary art environments. Seymour Rosen, founder of the SPACES Archive, which documents the genre of art environments, described the phenomenon. “Folk art environments are unique, personal places, which comprise of large-scale sculptural and/or architectural structures hand-built by self-taught artists, often during their leisure time…The folk art environment is quite simply a lovingly hand built, unique dream home.” It’s a helpful explanation, but folk art is actually “art of the people” and follows a cultural tradition. By definition, there are many more than “one” of a kind of folk art. For example, Russian nesting dolls and Scandinavian Dala horses are folk art, and there are many versions and creations, often interchangeable. This is not true with the outsider art environment, which is unique to its creator. And since not all of them are made by outsiders, and not all of them are motivated by visionary or religious impulses, I like the term grassroots art environments best. Such environments are not simply the overflow of hoarding, although the mind behind them may have similarities to the minds of those who hoard. These art environments are art in that they have been arranged purposefully. It is tricky to formulate hypotheses about the environments, because no two are alike, which also brings them the category of original art. Just as there are many paintings, but original paintings are singular and reflect their maker. Outsider art environments are personal, large-scale installations or assemblages created by their particular makers. They are profoundly individualist, reflecting unique personal passion, obsession, preference, and meaning. While the public is often welcome in these immersive home installations, they are not made for the public or with the purpose of the market in mind. Each of these art environments is distinct and driven by a very personal vision. In North Carolina, there is the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, full of huge kinetic wind-driven sculptures. In California, there is Salvation Mountain, where Leonard Knight created brightly coloured hills covered in religious messages with adobe clay and latex paint. Elmer Long’s Nevada bottle tree ranch salvages glass bottles of every colour and nothing else. When I was young and travelling through the Mississippi, I visited Margaret’s Grocery, where the Reverend Dennis stacked bricks up to the sky and painted them red and white, then painted scripture verses onto every available surface. There is a house in Toronto where I live that is completely covered in stuffed animals, which are also glued to the car parked out front. And just down the road from Ted’s is another art environment, created by Prophet Isaiah Robertson. Robertson painted his whole house and numerous erected crosses with intricate patterns in meticulous geometrics, each shape holding personal religious messages for him that he wanted to share with passersby. Photographer Greg Cook spent more than ten years driving around the USA documenting these curious displays. He is a frequent contributor to Raw Art Magazine, and holds exhibitions of his photography on the subject He calls them Wonderlands. It is extremely difficult to categorize and theorize about these Wonderlands. But those who attempt to understand them believe they are often driven by deep spiritual convictions, personal obsessions, or traumatic events. Some creators are impacted with severe mental illness, managing their minds through construction of their own realm. Others are simply eccentric and live by their own vision rather than by the norms and mores of society and culture. The creators transform ordinary spaces into their own deeply personal and idiosyncratic universes, often using recycled or discarded materials and repurposing them with their unique interpretations. The religious impulse is at the core of many such installations, such as Reverend Dennis’s world or Salvation Mountain, and that is why they are often called visionary environments. But many others are driven by other or unknown motivations. There may be a relentless desire or need to create, or more specifically, to build a world of their own, an environment that reflects their unique self that they themselves build, control, and transform. These impulses and obsessions reflect the fact that such environments are often born of trauma, offering the creator a sanctuary of their own space, an untouchable kingdom. Creating a paracosm or private universe provides people a psychological haven from a wider environment that may be confusing or abusive, while the creation itself offers space for processing and managing severe psychological distress or isolation. The repetition of motif or movements in the construction of the art environment often reveal a positive outlet for compulsive behaviours, helping creators manage traits like obsessive-compulsive disorders. Paradoxically, the paracosm can also reflect an identity that is unusually stable. Eccentrics live by their own passions without need for validation from group norms. Grassroots art environments are built by makers with diverse skill levels rather than by trained artists. Some have profound artistic talents or specific trade skills that contribute to the overall aesthetic and durability of their creation. Others do not. For this reason, each world is completely different and viewed with various levels of appreciation (or not) by those who chance a visit. Prophet Isaiah Robertson’s environment is kaleidoscopic, but very tidy, skillful and precise. Others, like Ted’s, are improvisational. The environments are vulnerable because they are subject to time and weather, with materials that are difficult to maintain and restore. Public perception of these art environments varies wildly. We are largely fascinated by them and drive long distances to gawk in admiration and horror. Most of us are naturally curious about anything unusual and about the motivations and behaviour of people we see as living outside the norms. While we may cheerfully spend money on an excursion out of town to take photos of these art environments, we often respond differently when the subject at hand is in our own backyard. Some communities rally for state funds to maintain or restore art environments when the owner moves away or passes on, but immediate neighbours often complain to the city or simply view the environment as an eyesore or hygienic risk. Comments on Facebook mention that someone tried to burn Ted’s house and yard down last year, though I can’t find an official account to verify whether this is true or not. Ted himself said to me that people often drove by and threw things at his yard, screaming out the window. I declined Ted’s invitation to venture inside the house, admittedly worried about fleas and rats. It was enough for my curiosity to be permitted to take photos outside. As I prepared to leave, Ted asked me to send him postcards from Toronto. He said he enjoyed getting mail. Again, I sensed a profound loneliness. I’ve never shaken that feeling, even when reading so many fond declarations about him. Sometimes a person with many friends can still be lonely. Even as I am uncomfortable imposing my own feelings on another, whose identity is theirs to define, I could not quite let go of the sense that being different and difficult to understand can be isolating even if everyone likes you. There are invisible barriers between people, even when they are nice to each other, and intimacy and deep connection is about more than cheerful wishes. Yet even if my feelings were true, there was little I could do beyond offering simple kindness. Later, when I showed my photos to a friend, he was outraged by the heaps of garbage on Ted’s lawn. “This is shameful,” he said. “The city should clean it up.” I was silent at first, but thought better of it after a few minutes and went back in conversation in defense of Ted’s world, told him how sweet Ted was to me when I intruded on his yard. Another friend introduced me to metta last year, gifting me a class at Toronto’s Zen Buddhism centre. Metta is a concept that translates to “benevolence” or “lovingkindness.” It may be interesting to note that religious rituals like metta or Christian prayers include repetitive practices that believers find invaluable in managing and processing the world. Metta involves repeated invocations for the wellbeing of others, working to shift one’s own heart into compassion for all people. The prayer is traditionally practiced in stages that aim to break down the barriers between yourself and others. It can be just a few minutes, or it can be repeated for twenty minutes or even hours. I practiced metta for Ted. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be free from suffering. May you live with ease. One is meant to empty their mind of everything during the prayer but the words and the feeling of metta, as a novice, or a visitor really to the ritual, my repetitions brought the idea of a record player skipping to my mind, in sync with the world of Ted’s Zoundz. When we said our thankyous and goodbyes, Ted kissed my hand again, and retreated back up onto the chair where he disappeared against a heap of bricks and blankets. I stepped over some soccer balls, hubcaps, and a pink pony. Darth Vader caught my eye beside a spindly broom, sweep side up, and scraps of an American flag, waving farewell. A stone Buddha statue tilted its head, a sage sentinel, as we drove away. Lorette C. Luzajic       
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 Woman and Puppet, by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1909 It’s a disturbing painting. A beautiful woman with pale skin and dark features stands nude save for a floral shawl and fingers full of rings, showing off shapely legs and teacup breasts. A grotesque doll-man with a macabre clown face, frill collar, and billowing pink gown slumps helplessly, subordinate. She holds his strings in both hands. The woman’s expression is both bored and defiant, daring the viewer to intervene and knowing we won’t. Mexican artist Angel Zaragga’s Woman and Puppet is meticulously painted, glossy, with rich colour contrasts and strong graphic lines. Zarraga’s style was constantly shifting, with quite a few Impressionistic landscapes, florals, and bathers, an assortment of forgettable canvases of soccer players, and then a preference for Cubist style works after encountering Picasso in Paris. His name is seldom mentioned today, but in his time he exhibited widely and was in demand for painting portraits. But his best paintings all carry the same striking dramatic aesthetic as Woman and Puppet. They are moody, strange, and polished, with mysterious, mythic figures in staged poses, with motifs suggestive of rich symbolism.  Ex Voto (Saint Sebastian), by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1912 Zarraga had only a handful of these masterpieces. I was lucky enough to see his most famous painting, Ex Voto (Saint Sebastian), at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. It’s a sublime work that seems to grapple with similar tensions of devotion and submission, serving up equal portions of beauty and pain. Sebastian is beautiful and erotic, his body as artfully posed as a dancer’s, a single arrow piercing his nipple. It was the artistic sensation of the Paris Salon in 1912. The Three Wise Men seems far removed from its Biblical story, turning into a sumptuous, sensual, Art Deco monument to all that glitters, with lavish attention paid to the beauty of the body and the ornament of jewels. These spectacular paintings seem to come out of nowhere, and disappear back into the ether they came from, as the artist moved forward into fuzzier palettes and then onto choppier, colourful deconstructions. But no doubt they were influenced by Julio Romero de Torres, whom the artist met in Spain in the years he lived there, studying with Joaquin Sorolla. De Torres’ paintings forged his own enigmatic style, seldom paralleled, drawing from Art Nouveau, symbolist art, and modernismo for his aesthetic, focused all the while on uniquely Spanish storytelling, with imagery from regional fashion, folklore, religion, and literature.  The Sin, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1915 Perhaps De Torres shows up outside Zarraga only in the work of Cuban painter Federico Beltran-Masses, who ran in the same circles and uses a similar lush palette and drama. His paintings are more thickly outlined than De Torres’ but the kinship of style and subject matter are unmistakeable. Beltran-Masses’ work was considered so erotic that it scandalized the conservative powers of art, and De Torres stood up in support of the merit of his paintings. With just a half-dozen or so known standout paintings that suggest De Torres’ influence, Zarraga has carved out a small but significant place in the pantheon of Mexican masters. Anyone who has seen these works has not walked away unscathed. Woman and Puppet is so strange to contemporary eyes that it might be mistaken for surrealism. (Zarraga did actually work with Giorgio de Chirico, whose pre-surrealist work inspired many of the surrealist painters.) It is the stuff of nightmares. We can’t help but thinking that the puppet man is alive in some terrible way, even as the mesmerizing beauty manipulating his strings seems empty, a vortex, despite her beauty. The femme fatale is an ancient archetype, surfacing in art, literature, and mythology throughout diverse cultures. She was especially appealing to the Romantic poets and to symbolist artists of the late 1800s. The femme fatale is attractive, sexy, and deadly. She lures men with her charm, then manipulates them for attention, money, or amusement, destroying them in the process. Men are her playthings, and she takes enormous pleasure from their decimation. The subtext of the story is often one of dominance and submission, with the lady in the driver’s seat. Zarraga’s painting comes from a French novel of similar name, The Woman and the Puppet, by Pierre Louys. In the story, a man becomes obsessed with a young Andalusian beauty he meets at a carnival in Seville, Spain. Despite being warned off by another man who admits to being her previous boy toy, he pursues Conchita, gets reeled in, then pushed away, until he is psychologically decimated. His power shifts completely to her hands, and he realizes he is her puppet. All the more alarming is the pleasure he feels alongside humiliation, as if he is only alive in the deprivation.  Gala and Paul Eluard. A real-life reference to Pierre Louys’ novel comes from Michele Gerber Klein’s biography of Gala Dali, a formidable figure who by all accounts was magnetic, powerful, demanding, and insatiable. Most of the circle of artists and writers in Gala’s wake were afraid of her and saw her as a kind of dominatrix. Ten years older and married when she met Salvador Dali, he spent the next fifty plus years in complete devotion and cuckoldry. Dali sometimes signed her name on his paintings and said all that he was, was because of her, and he was probably right. She was a shrewd and greedy manager, driving him to increasingly eccentric performances because the weirder he became, the bigger the cheques grew. She insisted on polyamory: she was in an open marriage with poet Paul Eluard when she met Dali, including a three-year menage-a-trois with surrealist painter Max Ernst. Eluard agreed to the terms, but he said he was tortured by her affairs. Even so, he continued to send passionate letters long after their divorce. Dali dutifully participated in performative orgy parties, but claims he only ever consummated his passions with Gala. When they were old, she insisted on living in a castle Dali paid for but was forbidden to visit, entertaining her young lovers and jet-setting around the world with them. Dali begged her to spend their final years together, but his request was refused. Gala continued to push him to work and earn when he was sick and weak, spending extravagantly on herself. Nonetheless, Gala’s story is no doubt complicated and surely Dali was no angel. Her peers were most certainly judgemental or misogynist. The surrealist artists were notoriously sexist, despite their claimed enlightenment. In Klein’s fascinating biography, Gala, she writes of Eluard and Gala dressing up for a ball. They both wore Pierrot costumes. Klein explains that Pierrot was an important figure in Symbolist poetry. Pierrot embodied the themes of idealism, emotion, alienation, and unrequited love. Eluard “styled himself as gala’s puppet: a reference to The Woman and the Puppet, Symbolist Pierry Louys’ novel about carnal obsession.” Eluard later said of the photo that he was dressed up as Gala.  The Puppet, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1791 Zarraga’s arresting artwork of his version of the dangerous woman is inspired by Louys’ book, but the book was at least partly inspired by another painting, The Puppet, by Francisco Goya, c. 1791. The painting depicts four women tossing a straw effigy of a man up and down with a blanket. We know this is the case because the victim, Don Mateo, explicitly compares himself to the figure in Goya’s painting. The stereotype of the femme fatale often shows up in times of cultural change and speaks to men’s anxieties about power exchanging hands. Modern feminist philosophy interprets the trope as misogynist, though some view her as a heroine rather than a villain, and the idea of her is seen as an empowering restoration of control to its rightful hands. Men have indeed long feared women’s power and independence, and have viewed their sexuality as dangerous, blaming women they find attractive for their unruly desires. However, the idea that no such woman exists, or that if she does, her strategies are justified, is equally problematic. Humans of all genders have their dark sides, and they use the powers available to them to execute their wiles. Perhaps what is most interesting about The Woman and the Puppet is the phenomenon it examines, and the complexity of human behaviour and desire. Today, the femme fatale is more often known as the narcissist, a term that often substitutes for sociopath when the perpetrator in question is a female. Female sociopathy presents differently from the male’s, as her violence is usually predominantly psychological (though not always.) I know the sadistic narcissist intimately. I was raised by one. This painting presents a profoundly chilling dramatization of something I witnessed and experienced a version of firsthand. From Potiphar’s wife to Karla Homolka, the ruthless woman is sometimes real, and the complexity of such personalities and situations are worth examination by writers and artists. The femme fatale is not a recurring theme in Zarraga’s oeuvre; nor does erotic desire make frequent appearances, which make its presence in these few works all the more mysterious. There are a few reasonably chaste looking nudes. Some of his sports paintings have been referred to as erotic, even homoerotic. I don’t see it myself. The latter is hardly likely, as Angel painted soccer because his first wife was a championship-level futbulista. On the other hand, the femme fatale shows her face again and again in the work of Julio Romero de Torres and Federico Beltran-Masses.  Salome, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1922 De Torres has least two versions of Salome, and Beltran-Masses has more. Salome was a Biblical beauty who danced for her stepfather, King Herod, who offered her, in exchange, anything she wished. She consulted with her mother, who bore a grudge against John the Baptist because he publicly denounced her marriage to the King. She advised Salome to request John’s head on a silver platter. The symbolic impact of a woman’s role in beheading a male, in cahoots with her mother, was irresistibly grisly. This story shows up frequently in literature and throughout art history, with depictions by Titian, Caravaggio, and Picasso, to name a few. One of Beltran-Masses Salome paintings showed Salome completely naked, with jewelled bands on her parted thighs and wrists, head thrown back, recoiling from the horror she wrought. The painting was six feet wide, and it was so scandalous and offensive that the artist removed it from public exhibition personally to appease his critics. The public then demanded its restoration, and the Royal Academy officially requested its return to the spotlight, where thousands flocked to view. Salome catapulted Beltran-Masses into superstardom, her powers undiminished by two millennia. Both de Torres and Beltran-Masses courted considerable controversy throughout their careers for shocking the arbiters of art, and both were extraordinarily popular with the public and their peers. Versions of the femme fatale showed up frequently in their bodies of work, but this archetype was only one subject of their kaleidoscopic explorations on the theme of women.  Salome, by Federico Beltrán-Masses (Cuba) 1918  La Belle Otero, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1914 De Torres examined feminine roles in Cordoba and Andalusian culture from a variety of perspectives, presenting traditional and modern women with sexuality and agency. He painted maternidad, or motherhood, and he also painted prostitution, without judgement. His exquisite portrait of La Belle Otero, a famous, rather, notorious, courtesan, is one she likely posed for in person. Otero was considered a femme fatale, a woman of insatiable greed who handpicked her client lovers from kings and counts. At least one of multiple duels over her patronage is documented, and legend holds that no less than six men committed suicide in the wake of scandal and spending themselves into the grave. Yet Otero was a skilled dancer, performer and model, a lively companion, and a great beauty, and her companionship was widely sought and valued. It is known that she was the victim of rape at the age of ten, and that she ran away to Lisbon at fourteen to become a dancer. Torres paints her as a figure of extraordinary dignity and intelligence. Flamenco was born in De Torres' backyard, and the lore of strong women in the mythology and performance of flamenco figures prominently in his work as well. As a painter, duality was an important theme, and De Torres frequently painted two women of contrast beside each other, suggesting a multiplicity of psychological motivations in women’s roles and how those roles were perceived. And he frequently alluded to the contrasts of traditional mores with the emerging independence of modern women, something signified by the recurring symbol in his work of women’s high heeled footwear.  Granada, by Federico Beltrán-Masses (Cuba) 1929 Beltran-Masses more often portrayed the wealthy and decadent revelers of the Jazz Age, using rich celebrities as his subject, a kind of Cuban-Spanish Great Gatsby treatment. His paintings were so lush and rich in palette, almost always building from a spectrum of blue that his colouring was called Beltran blue. Every celebrity and moneyed person vied for a place in his canvases. Americans praised his work for its psychological depth. Martha Graham created a dance inspired by his paintings. William Randolph Hearts bought at least four paintings. He portrayed countless people of great fame but his painting of Salome, shown devastated and remorseful for her part in the murder of the disciple John, was his favourite, according to the artist’s wife. He refused to sell it during his lifetime.  The Wise Men, by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1910 While De Torres and Beltran-Masses were prolific in works of their similar aesthetic and richly symbolic psychologies, Angel Zarraga only dabbled with the vibe. However, those are the very works that withstand the century. Zarraga’s skills were never in doubt: he was capable of anything as a painter, but most of his body of work simply does not stand out. His treatment of Saint Sebastian, The Wise Men, and the femme fatale are a different story. Ex Voto is strangely beautiful, and asks interesting questions about the boundaries between religious devotion and eroticism. The Wise Men reframes a familiar story in opulence and wonder. But in my humble opinion, Woman and Puppet is Zarraga's magnum opus. It is gorgeous and garish, and his brushstrokes unflinchingly demean Conchita’s prey into a helpless, tortured, husk of a man. Even so, it is the smug satisfaction on the face of the female figure that haunt long after the viewer has moved on. Lorette C. Luzajic |
Lorette C. LuzajicLooking at art and learning about it has been my lifelong passion, and it fuels everything I do: art creation, publishing, writing, and teaching. Visit this blog for occasional essays and musings on visual art. Categories
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