Lawrence Weiner's Simon Rodia Photograph

Photo by Chih-Hong Hsieh

The Watts Towers in Los Angeles, California, constructed by Simon Rodia

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I interviewed Weiner over the summer for Art+Auction magazine, not in his vast, multi-leveled studio in downtown Manhattan, which was undergoing renovations, but rather in an elegant, sparsely furnished brownstone in Chelsea, temporary quarters to which the artist, who is, in his own words, “not a possession-oriented person,” had moved only the essentials for his practice. Among these was a compact, vintage typewriter (what better tool for a wordsmith artist?); a small notebook emblazoned with the words “Love For Sale,” in which he records each time one of his works goes to a collector; and, propped up on an ornate mantel in the living room, a stark black-and-white photograph of an intent-looking man seemingly in the midst of a speech.

The man in the photo is Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who, despite having no formal training in architecture or engineering, spent more than 30 years, from 1921 to 1955, painstakingly constructing the Watts Towers in Watts, Los Angeles, the predominantly African-American district now largely identified with the brutal riots that occurred there ten years later. (Weiner certainly isn’t Rodia’s only fan—the outsider architect’s likeness appears next to Bob Dylan’s in the fantasy arrangement of figures on the cover of the 1967 Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.) The Towers are an interconnected set of steel structures, the tallest of them 99 feet high, encrusted with an elaborate mosaic of detritus: bits of broken glass, shells, ceramics. "What do you think he’s doing in the photograph?" I asked Weiner. “He’s standing there talking,” Weiner said. “He used to spend his life chasing away kids who were trying to vandalize his work.”

Weiner saw Rodia’s Towers in the late 1950s, shortly after their creation, when he was visiting Los Angeles and leaving sculptures along the side of the road as a sort of performance. They “knocked my socks off,” he said. “They are not schmaltzy at all. They are really something very special.” Weiner, who has also made work for public spaces, identifies with what Rodia once said was his reason for making the towers in Watts: “Because there are nice people here.” (In fact, Weiner says he paraphrased that sentiment years later when he accepted an award in Cologne.) “He was part of a society,” Weiner explained. “And he was making something in that society. It didn’t matter that there were drive-by shootings and bombings. There were nice people there, and he made this art, and it’s really super.”

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer for Art & Auction magazine.