The fence is doubly frustrating since the essence of the towers is that they are self-contained. At a certain point, when he was quite high up, Rodia was able to work from within the safety of each of the towers, so that the thing he was building — that grew around him — also served as a safety feature. Beyond that point, as the radius of the spire tightened, he had to step outside the spiralling cage but no scaffolding was used. The towers were—and remain — scaffolding: a highly decorative exo-skeleton for an absent interior. They were built with simple tools, with Rodia’s own hands, from basic materials — rebar, steels twisted and bent together without welding, bolts or rivets — so that the intimacy and intricacies of their construction are not concealed but laid bare. The sense is of something organic rather than planned: as if blood flowing through one of the main structural arteries will end up going though the smaller decorative radials. The hieroglyphics and patterns imprinted in the wet cement were formed by the tools used in the towers’ construction: hammers, the head of a garden hose. All of which adds to the impression of self-containment. If the towers are temples, they are dedicated to their own construction. Our guide told us that the legal limit on the height was a hundred feet. That, she said, was why Rodia brought the tallest of the three spires in at ninety-nine and a half feet. She might be right, but Rodia’s story is adorned with sentiment — bits and pieces of good feeling that cling to the legend like the broken bits of crockery and glass that he stuck into the cement of his towers. It is possible that the achieved height created the ceiling beyond which they were officially forbidden to grow. Freed from bureaucratic interference, they could implicitly have continued on forever, ad astra, in spite of the foundations being less than two feet in depth.
This was one of the reasons why, after Rodia had moved on, the city of Los Angeles condemned his construction as unsafe. Having purchased the property for three thousand dollars in 1959, Cartwright and King devoted their energies to preventing the demolition of the towers. The campaign for their preservation in the face of the city’s insistence that they be torn down (before an earthquake caused them to topple over) resulted in a deal and a test. If the structures were able to withstand ten thousand pounds of pressure — the equivalent of a seventy-mile-per-hour wind — they would be allowed to stay. On 10 October 1959, cables were attached, and force was exerted and increased until, our guide explained, the cable snapped. When a new and stronger cable was found, either the crane to which it was attached broke or the truck doing the tugging tilted on the axis of its wheels. We were getting into a realm of variant specificity where the facts are adorned so decoratively as to acquire a suggestion of the miraculous. This is either the enemy of truth or the product of insufficient documentation. It is also a highly malleable proof.
A different kind of test of their ability to withstand potential damage came in August 1965, a few weeks after Rodia had died. During the Watts riots, when the neighbourhood was set ablaze, the towers remained untouched and unmarked. This is factually correct, but Rodia didn’t just leave Watts and give the towers to a neighbour because the work was complete: he was tired of battling the city for permits and fed up with vandalism. Also, Watts had changed, had, by the early 1960s, become almost exclusively African American. In her book Pop L.A., Cécile Whiting writes that Rodia ‘seems to have envisaged the towers at certain times as a refuge from deteriorating conditions in Watts’ and ‘may have abandoned his home in 1955 because of the changing population around him.’ The irony is that after the uprisings the towers — spectacularly realized symbols of immigrant dreams — became resident totems of African American cultural expression and aspiration. ‘In other words, at virtually the same moment as the Watts Towers were preserved as part of the city’s cultural heritage, arguments broke out over whose heritage they represented.’ The malleability of the towers is such that they can surmount this perceived schism; their strength allows them to hold competing claims together like rope in a tug-of-love. Within a year of the uprising, they had become, according to a prestigious reporter for The New York Times—Thomas Pynchon, no less—‘a dream of how things should have been.’ The tense is crucial. Not how things might or will be in the future, but, with more than a touch of regret — even of nostalgia—‘should have been.’ It’s almost a corollary of the way the towers are always putting one in mind of something else: whatever one says always needs qualifying. Even loyal admirers would not claim them as an unqualified masterpiece. Unless. .
We are familiar with the idea of the work of art never being completed, only ever abandoned, but Rodia would seem to have abandoned his at the moment of completion. The moment of the towers’ completion was also the moment at which he was completed by his life’s work. In another sense, they are constantly being completed or fulfilled — by things like the Cherry album cover, by the visitors who come from all over the world, by the various festivals that take place here each year. (Explanatory panels on the fence stress the importance of the Gigli Festival held in Nola, Italy: ‘The Watts Towers resemble the icons used in the festival so closely that they are considered a likely inspiration for his work.’) Repairs have been needed, but the surprising durability of the original work was further enhanced and authenticated when it became apparent that, over the years, it was the repairs that needed repairing. The towers were more robust than the means employed to preserve them. Their capacity to create legends about themselves was self-generating and inexhaustible.
The wayward greatness of the towers — resolutely local and eccentrically universal — and the scale of Rodia’s achievement were attested to by admirers such as Buckminster Fuller and Jacob Bronowski (who in the course of describing a visit to the then unfenced towers in The Ascent of Man, declared them to be his ‘favourite monument’). Whether or not Rodia created a work of art is another question. Or at least the question ‘Is it a work of art?’ brings with it another: what kind of work of art might it be? There is the tacit belief here that ‘work of art’ is the ultimate proof of value and test of worth (more rigorous and demanding than the force exerted by the stress test), but one of the functions of the towers might be to resist or undermine this idea — to question the legitimacy of the question being posed. Maybe the towers are more than a work of art and the idea of art is not an adequate gauge by which to measure this kind of achievement.
The towers are unique, but as a phenomenon of determined, self-sufficient creation on an epic scale they are neither unprecedented nor without equal. John Berger has written about one such endeavour: ‘a palace passing all imagination,’ as the postman Ferdinand Cheval termed his creation in Hauterives, in the Department of the Drôme in France. Cheval (1836–1924) worked for thirty-three years single-handedly building and sculpting his ideal palace. ‘This work is naked and without tradition,’ writes Berger, ‘because it is the work of a single “mad” peasant.’ Viewed from Watts, however, the existence of Cheval’s palace means that there might be a tradition after all, even if it’s a scattered and meagre one. That Rodia was unaware of such a possibility enables us to identify one of this tradition’s defining elements as a lack of consciousness of such a tradition. Another is that other instances or components of that tradition remain unknown and uncelebrated by the world at large, and therefore unpreserved (to say nothing of the large number of such projects that, in spite of their creator’s best intentions, were never completed). Cheval’s reasonable boast—‘I have carved my own monument’—might provide an epigraph for all such lonely enterprises but, by definition, those words have to be re-conceived, recarved and re-written every time an individual pledges himself to an undertaking of this kind. Quotation is impossible, even if the message is the same.