Tressa Prisbrey had a simple explanation for why she spent 26 years trucking back and forth to the garbage dump in her Studebaker pickup to create a luminescent village made of one and a half million discarded bottles.
“Anyone can do anything with a million dollars–look at Disney,” the late folk artist once wrote. “But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it.”
Still, not even the redoubtable Grandma, as she was known, could have dreamt up the Battle of Bottle Village now being played out in Washington and in Simi Valley, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles, where Mrs. Prisbrey lovingly concocted her architectural fantasy village from 1955 to 1983.
Just as so-called outsider art is gaining widespread legitimacy, the Bottle Village that Grandma began building at age 60–one of only nine folk environments listed on the National Register of Historic Places–has become the focus of a bubbling dispute over the allocation of $436,000 in federal disaster relief to repair damage it sustained three years ago in the Northridge earthquake.
The controversy over Grandma’s fragile 13-structure shrine has pitted a band of Prisbreyite preservationists against local politicians, most notably Rep. Elton Gallegly, a Ventura County Republican, who has introduced a bill to block Federal Emergency Management Agency funds from going to Bottle Village.
In response, the agency announced it would withhold the money until a “thorough review of eligible damages can be completed,” said Vallee Bunting, a spokeswoman. A major issue is how much damage to Grandma Prisbrey’s assemblages of bottles and mortar was a result of the quake.
“Grandma was an OK builder,” said Bud Goldstone, a retired aerospace engineer who has spent 38 years refurbishing Watts Towers in Los Angeles, the country’s most famous folk environment. “But she didn’t build well enough to withstand a 6.7 earthquake.”
The prospect of rebuilding Tressa Prisbrey’s village, roof by roof and bottle by bottle, speaks to the precarious nature of these singular, self-expressive environments after their creators are gone. (Mrs. Prisbrey died in 1988 at age 92.)
In a broader sense, the tempest over Bottle Village, which Mrs. Prisbrey began as a place to house her collection of 17,000 commemorative pencils, also is symbolic of the uneasy relationship that has long existed between self-taught artists, whose creations are products of fiercely individual and obsessive visions, and the outside world.
“These artists have neither social nor artistic standing,” said John Beardsley, the author of “Gardens of Revelation” (Abbeville Press, 1995), about extraordinary creations built in ordinary backyards.
“They’re often not recognized by cultural institutions. They don’t have social connections. So there is almost no one advocating for them.”
Grandma’s fodder was the forgotten universe: as a builder she was partial not only to bottles but also to lamp shades, lipstick cases and television tubes. Like the trout, she seized upon anything that glinted.
“Like most folk environments,” Goldstone noted, she built with gumption rather than “by building codes.”
In 1984, worried about the safety of the structures, the City of Simi Valley restricted public access, and since the earthquake in January 1994, Bottle Village has been officially closed. Goldstone estimates that about 15 percent of the village was damaged by the quake, and it is these walls and structures that would be repaired with federal funds.
To those who cherish such handmade, offbeat places, the battle over Grandma Prisbrey’s village is both cause for alarm and an occasion to wish for a refill for one of her 2,500 milk of magnesia bottles. They note that the Watts Towers, which received about $900,000 from FEMA for earthquake repair, was threatened with demolition in the 1950s but now attracts an estimated 25,000 visitors a year.
“Bottle Village is one of the woman-made wonders of the world,” said Richard Posner, a Los Angeles glass artist who is writing a book on what he calls “no-deposit, no-return architecture.”
“It’s an example right beneath our noses of mid-20th Century alchemy, of a woman with no formal training or education who created this magical garden out of discarded flotsam and jetsam.”
The one-third acre site is overgrown, many of its shrines and grottoes caked with dirt. It is owned and operated by Preserve Bottle Village, a nonprofit troop of volunteers.
As Janice Wilson, the group’s president, observed, “There are feelings embedded in every inch of this place.”
For the record, its ornamental sidewalks are embedded with tools, license plates, guns, crockery, trumpets, hood ornaments and a plaque with a recipe for French dressing.
Gallegly, a former mayor of Simi Valley, calls Bottle Village “an eyesore 25 or 30 years ago that has gone downhill dramatically ever since.” He added: “When we have senior citizens worried about money for Medicare, and children worried about whether they can get an education, how in the world can we spend half a million dollars on something no one wants?”
Sandi Webb, a Simi Valley councilwoman, has drafted a petition that says that it is better to “bulldoze Bottle Village” than to spend taxpayers’ money rebuilding it. The City Council recently wrote a letter supporting the congressman’s bill.
In a sense, said City Manager Mike Sedell, Bottle Village has become “a lightning rod” for local frustration with FEMA.
“People’s lives were turned upside down,” he said. “The police station was basically destroyed, and funds still aren’t finalized. Then, after three years of struggling, they read that FEMA is funding $436,000 for a specific art project. The council is saying, `This doesn’t make sense.’ “
Mrs. Prisbrey was born Thresie Luella Schafter in 1896 in Easton, Minn. A blacksmith’s daughter, she moved to Simi Valley in the 1950s as a widow with seven children, and later married Al Prisbrey, a construction worker. Tired of moving around, the ever-prickly Mrs. Prisbrey removed the wheels of her house trailer in 1955.
“I hid them,” she once explained, “so we had to stay put.”
She created a prismatic world out of bottles–their necks facing outward to achieve a glistening, stained-glass effect. Bottle Village includes a Doll House for her 550 dolls and a Round House with round furniture and a jingly fireplace made out of intravenous feeding tubes.
In part, she has admitted, the village was a way to entertain grandchildren and ease her own loneliness. It also was the place to shelter her own children when they came home to die (she outlived all but one).
“It’s a domestic environment, a woman’s environment,” said Beardsley, the author. “It is a significant monument both to creativity and love of family.”
Paradoxically, the brouhaha over Bottle Village comes just as outsider art is attracting critical attention.
At the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M., the current show, “Recycled, Re/Seen: Folk Art From the Global Scrap Heap,” celebrates Prisbrey-esque derring-do worldwide, from Mexican toys made from flip-flop sandals to Zulu baskets woven from telephone wire.
Museums dedicated to outsider art have opened in Baltimore and the Netherlands. Several weeks ago, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York announced a new center dedicated to scholarly research on contemporary self-taught artists.
And at the 5th annual Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan recently, the black-turtleneck crowd spent $2 million to $3 million on outsider art, the show’s organizer, Sanford Smith, estimated.
Much of it was in le style Prisbrey, and the more compulsive or incarcerated the creator, it seemed, the better. Tellingly, perhaps, a painted wooden doll from Possum Trot, a dismantled folk-art environment in Mojave Desert, fetched $28,500, giving rise to the question of whether a similar fate is in store for Grandma.
Much more than bottles are at stake, said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, a senior curator at the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Works like Bottle Village and the Smithsonian’s “Throne of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly” made by the late James Hampton out of recycled furniture, light bulbs and foil, represent “people trying to make physical meaning out of the stuff of daily life,” she said. Their creative visions offer “a striking contrast to a culture oriented toward homogenization.
“In a country that’s founded on principles of individuality and independence,” she continued, “it’s ironic that expressions of such fierce independence come under such fire.”
Bottle Village’s status as a landmark and museum artifact made it eligible for FEMA funding, said Leland Wilson, the agency’s senior official for Northridge Earthquake Recovery, though he hastened to add that relief funds can only be used for earthquake-related damage, not deferred maintenance.
Preservation of folk environments–there are roughly 700 in the United States–is rather haphazard, largely dependent on well-organized enthusiasts.
In Houston, for example, the Orange Show, a loopy but lovable environment dedicated to the wondrous fruit, attracts 30,000 to 50,000 visitors a year and receives money from private sources, state and city arts councils.
Goldstone, the engineer who developed the load test that proved Watts Towers remained safe after the City of Los Angeles ordered it demolished, said that Bottle Village was repairable.
But updating Grandma’s to meet current historic preservation and safety standards, especially California earthquake and wind regulations, would take a full-time conservator, a curator of collections, architectural draftspeople, photographers and a new technical system to secure her beloved beams and bottles (bonding them to metal frames with acrylic is one idea).
