Category:
Outsider Art

The Sculpture Garden of Veijo Rönkkönen



Full article here.

Lots of great photos here.

Veijo Rönkkönen was a recluse who spent his days between the paper mill where he worked for 41 years, and his farm, tucked away in a Finnish forest. By all accounts, he didn’t like to talk to people, and he never took an art lesson in his life. But by the time of his death in 2010, Rönkkönen had covered his land with around 550 sculptures. Nearly all of them depicted human figures: people of all ages and ethnicities, frozen in moments of play, athleticism, and even agony.

Posted By: Paul - Thu Nov 16, 2023 - Comments (1)
Category: Outsider Art, Statues and Monuments, Europe

The Films of Jean Rollin

I confess to never having heard of this director until recently. But his legacy certainly seems one of High Weirdness. A new documentary (first clip) chronicles his career.

His Wikipedia page.

Caution: Mild nudity in the clips.





Posted By: Paul - Tue Apr 18, 2023 - Comments (3)
Category: Horror, Movies, Outsider Art, Fantasy, Europe, Twentieth Century

Gamma Goochee



A YouTube commenter explains:

According to the notes to "Great Googa Mooga" (Ace CHCD 830) Gamma Goochee Himself was a dental technician named John Mangiagli from southern California. Each year, he would spend his summer vacation making and promoting a self-produced record. This disk was the only one that even came close to charting in the US. The backup singers were his pre-teen nieces. Strange song, even stranger story behind it..


Hear another song by Mangiagli at the link (non-embeddable).





Posted By: Paul - Thu Jan 19, 2023 - Comments (3)
Category: Amateurs and Fans, Jabberwocky, Scat Singing, Nonsense Verse and Glossolalia, Music, Outsider Art, 1960s

Winter Zero’s Musical Bottle Farm

From the 1930s to the 1950s, one of the most popular oddities to visit in Ohio was Winter Zero Swartsel's "Bottle Farm" located outside of Farmersville. (He said he got his name because he was born on a "hard, cold winter day.") Here's a description of it from the historical marker now at the site:

While chiding the American people for their wastefulness and abusing their environment, his 22 acres of farmland became his artist's canvas filled with the thousands of items he collected from the “wasteful.” Winter Zellar (Zero) Swartsel's farm property became a field of glass as he adorned it with sculptures and “art” using glassware of all kinds, bells, bed frames, wood, and other discarded items. His finest works, fashioned from bottles titled “Kindly Light” and “Full Measure” created the popular Farmersville Bottle Farm. The farm also provided interesting listening experiences. In addition to the bells and twinkling glass that rang out in the wind, residents in town could count on hearing “The Old Rugged Cross” played on loud speakers on Sundays. Bells on grazing sheep added to the “noises” he described as restful. The farm attracted visitors from every state in the nation except Delaware.

Curious that there were no visitors from Delaware.

Photo by Edward Weston



Photo by Edward Weston



Here's another description of the Bottle Farm from "Joe" on Angelfire:

I grew up in the 1950's in a little town called Farmersville (population about 1000) in southwestern Montgomery County, Ohio. We lived on the western edge of town and about a mile out of town on that same road there existed a most peculiar farm called The Bottle Farm. Whenever we drove by, the most striking feature of this odd farm was that the fields bristled with poles driven into the ground at rather random locations. Each vertical pole had a series of glass bottles affixed to it at an angle to the pole, rather like very productive corn stalks with glass ears of corn and no leaves. Many of the glass bottles were of colored glass and it all glittered in the sunlight.

Scattered across the fields were heavy wooden structures that supported old church bells. To each bell's clapper was loosely wired an irregularly cut piece of tin painted flat black. Each piece of tin had some Indian words or a short phrase or saying scrawled across it in white paint. Whenever the wind blew, the pieces of tin would dance in the breeze and cause the clappers to clang the bells.

Dayton Daily News - Aug 18, 1954



Pittsburgh Press - Jun 12, 1938



News reports indicate that Swartsel wasn't on the best of terms with the surrounding community. He had a habit of shooting at teenagers whom, he claimed, were trespassing on his property.

When he died in 1953 the city tried to preserve the Bottle Farm as a tourist attraction but gave up after two years and auctioned everything off. Today the historical marker is the only reminder of the Farm's existence at the location.

Posted By: Alex - Mon Nov 22, 2021 - Comments (2)
Category: Eccentrics, Outsider Art

Unauthorized Dwellings 16



If you walked down Mitte’s Oranienburger Straße at any point between 1990 and 2012, you would have likely noticed a commanding, if dishevelled, structure located just a short distance from the synagogue. Up until five years ago, the second-most visited art attraction in Berlin wasn’t the East Side Gallery or Museum Island, it was this five-storey building: aka Kunsthaus Tacheles. Taken over by artists after the Wall fell in 1990, the building was transformed into a creative commune. It was quintessential post-Wende Berlin: upon their occupancy, the artists launched a legal battle for the property and rescued it from demolition, maintaining a presence for 22 years.


Full essay here.


The Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Apr 19, 2021 - Comments (0)
Category: Antisocial Activities, Art, Outsider Art, Unauthorized Dwellings, 1900s, 2000s, 2010s, Europe

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