Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Concrete and Respect (Wisconsin part I of II)

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

Benjamen, Mathilde and Arthaud head off on a family trip to Wisconsin to see art environments built by immigrants out of concrete and to discover what’s going on in rural America today. Plus: making Pawn America great again! ******** CLICK on PHOTO for a detailed run down on the show *************

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Concrete and Respect, Wisconsin, Part 1. In southwestern Wisconsin, in Hollanddale, there is a remarkable sight of State Highway 39, an outdoor park open to the public. From the car you can see a house that stands still on top of the hill and dominates the grassland around. It's called Grandview because of its panoramic setting. It could be the little house on the prairie, set in dairyland, but its creator added some sparkles. His home shines like a sweet cake. We park at the entrance. Artaud and I follow Benjamin up the path to the house. We're greeted by a sculpture of a smiling organ grinder. He has a little

monkey who waved at us. On his instrument, an inscription says, Thank you. This is Mona. She's a member of the foundation that takes care of Grandview. She personally knew the man who built all this, Nick Engelbert. Nick was our milkman. And he used to come real early in the morning when it was winter. And when it was cold

it would freeze and they had those round cardboard tops and they would go up because the cream would be there and oh it would be icy and it was so good we'd pour it and drink icy milk and of course they couldn't do that now because it wouldn't be pasteurized he hurt his leg I think was the story and then he just started doing these things as a hobby. And Catherine told my mother that she never knew what he was doing until it was done.

In the late 30s, Nick covered his farmhouse with concrete and added charts of china, glass, seashells, and portraits to the facade. This camouflage of concrete and objects transformed his wood house into an imaginary and fantastic film set. Nick also built concrete sculptures, a total of 40 over 15 years. I noticed an imposing Viking traveling in a sailboat and three men in black and red holding hands around the flag of Switzerland. He covered all the nationalities.

There's the Blarney Castle for the Irish, and he has the Viking for the Norwegians. This could be the Garden of United Nations. So he really covered everyone. The Swiss Patriots are obviously a tribute to his wife. That one's for Catherine. That's Rick Rossmeier, another Grandview caretaker. This is an Austrian eagle, I believe.

That would be his heritage. In Grandview, immigrants and travelers are always welcome. I feel it. Nick used concrete to make sculptures, not walls. And the hobo at the bottom is a representation. There used to be a railroad through town, and it's a representation of hobos that would stop all the time and visit, and they could always get a meal and a place to sleep.

I think that's what I love about Nick, is that he gave this to other people. He didn't build this just for himself. Rick's wife, Marilyn, says the road was essential to Nick's vision. I think he did it just to see what people do when they drove by. What would it look? Who would come to his yard? What conversations would it bring to him? As you can hear,

cars are still zooming by. But sometimes they slow down and stop. Thanks to the effort of Marilyn, Rick and Mona, and the Colour Arts Centre, a museum-slash-foundation dedicated to preserving Wisconsin's art environments like Grandview. This is why we are here. The Colour Arts Centre invited Benjamin to visit the unconventional collection and respond to it for his podcast. I convinced him to turn it into a family trip. For this mini-series, we will visit a number of outdoor sites, gardens of memory and dreams,

museums of the self, utopian and magical architectures, all built by untrained artists like Nick and Goldbert. In Nick's garden of United Nations, travelers coexist with characters from folklore. And animals, an eagle, a peacock, and a lion. The lion has recently been restored. Mona doesn't like him. The old lion they had, if you stood at the front and looked at his eyes, he looked fierce. This one doesn't.

Mona took us into the house to see the remains of Paul Bunyan. A sculpture waiting to be restored. The hand and the belt. I'm now standing nose to nose with the superhero of Middle America, the giant lumberjack, known

for his strength, speed and skill at deforesting. He supposedly cleared the forest from the northeast to the Pacific Ocean with his friend Babe, the blue ox. Paul Banyan. Maybe Tocqueville met him on his trip across America.

In his famous essay De la démocratie en Amérique, Alexandre de Tocqueville wrote, In Europe people talk a great deal of the walls of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them. They are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature, and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forest that surrounds them till they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight.

The American people views its own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes and subduing nature. Yes, in preparation for this trip to Wisconsin, I decided to read Tocqueville, the French political thinker who came to America early in the 19th century to witness this great forest clearing and to better understand

how the Americans were building their new world. What might he have thought about Nick's grand view? All the sculptures in the yard were built with the same technique used for the house. Concrete, unbuddied with various materials and objects. It's also not hard to find fossils around. We could tell Rick, Marilyn and Mona spent a lot of time identifying the stuff Nick put in the concrete. These swizzle sticks are favorites. It's mostly local stones, glass and fossil fragments.

Benjamin was totally fascinated by all the things Rick showed him. I'm getting up in years, but I think that's a hire's roof beer. Can you tell us a little bit more about the... Wait, wait, no, I want to see more things, see more things. Wisconsin was a land of adoption for many in the 30s, and Nick was one of the new immigrant settlers.

Nick was from Austria. His Austrian name was Engelbert Kaletnik, but he got himself a good American name when he got here. Nick Engelbert, thinking that would be easier. So Nick himself, the little piece of glass smooshed in the Wisconsin concrete. And Grandview, a shiny country mosaic. A monument built in deep appreciation of America. Freedom is what keeps this American mosaic from falling apart.

That's what Tocqueville discovered. Liberty gave the emerging democracy prosperity and knowledge, and safeguarded its equalitarian system from despotism. Nick Engelbert was not a philosopher, but he felt the same way about his adopted homeland. There's a famous quote that Nick had said years ago. If a man can't be happy on a little farm in Wisconsin, he hasn't the makings of happiness in his soul. And that has been used time and time again by people.

But preceding that statement, he said something to the effect of, there's no freedom like in the U.S. and I know because I've been everywhere else. A lot of work has gone into restoring Grandview to its original glory. But I wonder if the American Nick loved is beyond repair. Before we left, Rick showed us one more sculpture. It was probably meant to be funny. But now, in its current damaged state, it seems sinister. Tell me about this photo and then we'll talk about what's left.

This is a depiction that Nick made in a political statement. And it was an elephant and a donkey representing the two major parties. And then Uncle Sam trying to drive them like a team of horses. And the sign Nick had said something to the effect of, it's hard to get a day's work done with a team like this. So that's an easily transferable motif to today's politics. Except all that's left is the elephant, which is really transferable to today's politics.

Oh, goodness. Yeah, it is. When I was invited by the Kohler Arts Center to tour Wisconsin and visit some of the art environments they've been instrumental in preserving, I jumped at the opportunity. Our route would take us through a number of counties that had voted for Donald Trump, counties that had voted for Barack Obama in previous elections. So this would be a journey not only into America's past, but also into its future. That statue on the lawn at Grandview, the one Nick built, the piece with the elephant and the donkey pulling Uncle Sam along. Well, it's tempting to see this statue as I did, as a metaphor for America in 2017, now that the Republicans have taken control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House.

As you just heard, all that remains of Nick's piece is the elephant. But this statue makes an even stronger metaphor for the state of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Republican Party controls four of the five statewide offices and holds a majority in both the Senate and State Assembly. They also hold one of the state's U.S. Senate seats and five of the state's eight U.S. House of Representatives seats. In Wisconsin, the elephant is totally devouring the donkey. And the man seated at the head of the table is Governor Scott Walker. Like Donald Trump, he came to power demonizing criminals, regulations, gays. But once he took office, he went after teachers, civil servants, collective bargaining.

This was a national story. You might remember there were giant protests, a recall vote. But the thing is, Scott Walker powered through all the outrage and condemnation. He won. He won the recall fight in 2012, and he won re-election in 2014. I'm reading a book about how all this went down. While Mathilde has her nose in Tocqueville, I'm reading a book called The Politics of Resentment.

The author, Katherine Kramer, is a sociologist at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and she spent years driving around the state, dropping in on informal gatherings in rural areas, gas stations, cafes, churches, in order to listen. She says her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. And she has a theory I like very much. I have learned, she writes, that there are many people who have a strong resentment towards these cities and urban elites. They feel as though they are not getting their fair share

of power. No one is really listening to them. They feel they are not getting their fair share of taxpayer dollars. The money goes to the cities. And they also feel they are not getting their fair share of respect. Now, a lot of this comes down to perception, because in the grand scheme of things, the tax revenue collected from urban centers, Madison, Milwaukee, subsidizes most of Wisconsin's rural areas. This is in fact true for the country as a whole. But what Catherine Kramer discovered was that rural people perceive the opposite. And it's resentment that is driving this perception. Time and time again, rural people say to her, I'm a hardworking American, a deserving person,

but the things I deserve are actually going to other people who are less deserving. It's why the rural people she meets cheer for Scott Walker every time he attacks Madison in Milwaukee, because this is where the undeserving live. The university professors, civil servants, the poor, all the folks who take resources that should go to them. For Catherine Kramer, rural resentment is the key to understanding Scott Walker's victories, and perhaps Donald Trump's as well.

As we pull into a parking lot outside of Madison, I can't help but notice the name emblazoned in red, white, and blue on the giant big box store. Pond America. I guess folks are still constructing patriotic concrete monuments in Wisconsin. I venture inside. The first thing I notice are the video games. There are shelves and shelves of video games. It's also where all the action is. Pond America isn't crowded,

but the customers who are here are all perusing the video games. When possible, great effort was made to tidy up original packaging. but in most cases there is no packaging because these are items that were in use and of use to the people who parted with them. This is especially true of the tools. None of the tools in Pond America have original packaging. They're just all piled on the floor, next to the video games, next to the digital camera display and along the back wall, next to the bicycles. Tools for cutting, building, smashing, welding, chopping and fixing.

Pond America is a Minnesota-based chain, but they have four stores in Wisconsin. Well, now there are only three. You see, they filed for bankruptcy the very week of our road trip. Bankruptcy protection will allow CEO Brad Rixman to restructure some debt. He only hopes to close a few stores. He plans to reorganize and emerge from bankruptcy stronger. He's assured his shareholders and creditors that he will make Pond America great again. Rixman's lucky he won't have to pay the kind of interest rates his other business, Payday America, offers.

277%. Yeah, according to a 2015 story in the Star Tribune, this is an average of what Rixman's customers end up paying. 277% interest. Perhaps this explains why Rixman is having such a hard time these days. Because with 277% interest, who has any money left to spend at the pawn shop after receiving their American payday? Outside the small town of Spada, Wisconsin, there is another art environment, also built by immigrants from Europe in the 30s.

Like Grandview, it's on the side of the road, with concrete structures and sculptures, all gleaming with colorful pieces of glass and bright stones. This was once the farmland of Paul and Matilda Wegner and after they retired from their work, they had an inspiration to start building on this site. Gerard Roll is the director of the local history museum in Sparta. He met us for a short tour. We're looking now at the model of the Bremen ocean liner. It's possible Paul and Mathilda Wegner built this ship to symbolize

their journey from Germany to America. They were definitely erecting monuments to their own history. This is a replica of their 50th anniversary wedding cake. Imagine a giant puffy cake in the middle of the lawn. On top stands a crown holding a green star. Really tacky.

Paul and Mathilda were self-taught artists, so perhaps simple, concrete geometric forms like triangles and circles were easy starting points. Stone canvases on which to project their shared history. Boots and cakes. We see, obviously, broken glass. We see pieces of stone. Similar to Grandview, all the concrete forms have objects embedded in them.

China, we see remnants of dolls, for example. Benjamin again focused his energy on the broken elements. He was really concerned about the sharp edges. Have you ever cut yourself on any of this? I don't think I have. Paul and Mathilda didn't leave any records about their creative process. And as an historian, Gerard is cautious to assume the motivations and intentions of the retired couple.

But some things are obvious. The Wegener's, they wanted to, you know, they created what was important to them. So you see a lot of elements related to home, to patriotism and to Christianity. When you look closely at the colorful mosaics that cover the church they built, the centerpiece of the garden, you see representation of multiple denominations. Greek Orthodox, Baptist, Evangelical, Unitarian. Here we even see one God, one brotherhood, Jew, Lutheran, Catholic. That was their heart behind it.

Here we can go and look inside now. Standing in the church, I realized it was, in a way, a physical manifestation of Tocqueville's vision of a successful democracy. This agnostic philosopher believed that religion and all types of them were good for America, for the free political spirit. Faith supplies order and certainty,

counterbalancing the doubting, agitated and independent democratic soul. It acts as a unifying social force against the perils of individualism, materialism and despotism. Like Tocqueville, the Wegener's understood religion and democracy were not at odds. Next to the church is a giant American flag. They fly the flag and you'd clearly see it from the road, from Highway 71. They are trying to communicate, I would say, that they are proud to be part of this country now. I really like this do-it-yourself crafty version of the flag. Recycled pieces of white, red and blue glass conglomerated together to create an unified picture.

I imagine Paul and Mathilda taking their time selecting and assembling all these sharp elements to create an image of America that is far from perfect. An old and junky looking emblem. pour créer une image d'Amérique qui n'est pas du tout parfaite. Un emblème vieux et junkie. Sur sa voyage dans l'Amérique, Tocqueville développe son idée de patriotisme réflectif. Contrairement à un amour instinctif pour votre pays, un sentiment indéfinable et inintéressant queested sentiment that you can find in an old regime like France, a feeling confused with the love and respect you have for your ancestors and the houses you grew up in,

this reflective patriotism is a rational feeling, a less generous, a less passionate one, but more fruitful and sustainable. The Reflective Patriot is grateful to our country for what it gave her, for a right to participate in the system, and she believes in our contribution to its wealth. Paul and Mathilda's reflective flag is a symbol of not only their patriotic pride, it is also a reward, a personal mark of recognition and gratitude to America. But Tocqueville also saw something ominous in reflective patriotism. He wrote, The citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his own,

and he labors not merely from a sense of pride and duty, but from what I venture to call greed. I certainly would not venture to call the Wegener's greedy, but their spirituality and patriotism did not preclude economic opportunity. Shortly after they started constructing the site, the newspapers would report on how on Sundays, people out for Sunday drives, back when we did that sort of thing, they would make a point to stop here and check on the progress of the site.

And it became very popular with people to stop here on Sundays. So much that the Wegener's, they had postcards made of the site as they even went along. Once they finished a piece, they would get a new postcard published and have it available to sell along with soda pop down at the front of the peace monument down there to people because there were so many people stopping by here. The Wegners were true reflective patriots nestled in a turnoff between a Panera Bread and a Tires Plus just outside of La Crosse, Wisconsin

there's another Pond America. Inside this giant concrete box, I find more piles of tools and more people perusing the video games. This time, I have my recorder. But when I approach a guy and ask him if I can chat with him for my podcast,

he snarls, No. I shrug and walk away. I know I should try harder. La Crosse is one of the Wisconsin counties that voted for Donald Trump. Perhaps this guy clutching a copy of Call of Duty. But well, the scene in Pond America is just so bleak.

So I bail I walk to the Panera Bread and use the bathroom Here, it's nothing but laptops and iPads, yoga pants and smartphones I've yet to see any evidence of a blue-red divide here in Wisconsin Only a people with more stuff and people with no stuff divide. We spend the night at a hotel in downtown La Crosse. The guy who checks us in gives us each a piece of chocolate. Back in the day, this was once a chocolate factory. Matilda's furious I chose this place, but it is exactly what I wanted to see with my own eyes.

A place that could have teleported into downtown La Crosse from San Francisco or Brooklyn or Portland. But this mirage only goes as far as the parking lot. I go on a beer run to a liquor store a few blocks away, and as I pull up in my car, an arrest is going down. Five cops have this scrawny tattooed guy with a mullet pinned on the ground. More cops are trying to restrain an overweight woman in a leather dress who is screaming at the other cops who are chasing a dog around with their guns drawn. In lacrosse, fentanyl and carfentanil arrests have spiked over 60% since 2014. Overdoses are on the rise as well. Perhaps this is the best way to visualize divided America.

Artisanal chocolate versus artisanal heroin. After lacrosse, we drive up north to a small farm in the woods. Mathilde's booked this one, and the owners are just as baffled by us as we are of them. You see, there are more dead animals mounted on the walls than there are live animals in the pens. They aren't actually a farm. They run a lodge for hunters, and it's off-season. Our farm-to-table meal turns out to be chicken fingers from the supermarket. The woman can sense our disappointment.

There are no organic markets around here, she says. I have to drive 50 miles just to find good organic milk. After dinner, Mathilde puts Artaud to bed. Oh my gosh, the woman says, your wife must be so sad about the election in her country. You've been following the French election, I ask. Macron had just beaten Le Pen in the final round. Oh, I read things online, she replies. But don't worry, Donald Trump will take care of all the globalists and the bankers, even the French ones. Trying hard not to show my excitement, I cautiously ask, but what about all the Wall Street bankers Donald Trump has in his administration?

He doesn't have any bankers working for him, she retorts. You're reading fake news. I know. I should have immediately gotten my recorder out. Because here I was, face to face with a rural Wisconsin Trump voter, a woman who seemed to emerge whole from the pages of Katherine Kramer's book, The Politics of Resentment. But I don't. I don't know how to argue with someone

who is clearly in denial about basic reality. Even just getting my recorder out and letting her talk wasn't an option because it would have been impossible for me to listen to her with a straight face so she'd be justified in shooting me the sneering city liberal mocking her in her own home but where would they put my stuffed body they're out of wall space they've even mounted a deer to the side of the TV. I don't want to end up as a gun rack or as a toilet paper holder in the bathroom.

So I just nod my head and with as much fake politeness and fake goodwill as I can muster, I get up and I say, have a good night. In the morning, both our hosts join us for toast and coffee. The man tells us he has roots in Lithuania, a country they've both visited in the past. Have you ever been to New York, I ask. No, the man scoffs, why would we ever go there? Then the woman turns to Mathilde, does your son go to school? How does that work with all the welfare people?

In her book, The Politics of Resentment, Catherine Kramer lays out the three fundamental beliefs of what she calls rural consciousness. Rural folk believe they are not getting their fair share of power. They believe they are not getting their fair share of taxpayer dollars. And they believe they are not getting their fair share of respect. As far as respect goes, they're right. In fact, I'd say they are about 277% right. The most famous concrete park in Wisconsin is up in the north, deep in the woods. Over 200 huge sculptures tightly packed together in a small space. Their creator, Fred Smith, used the same technique as Nick, Paul and Mathilda.

Concrete decorated with broken objects. Entering was like walking into a dark and animated forest who were surrounded by imposing creatures with glass fangs. But this is a friendly place. At the entrance, on a plank, a sweet deer jumps over a log. This, of course, is an iconic image of the Northwoods. But then he added a little bit of sparkle on the top to create interest. Gay Marshkey is a longtime member of the Friends of Fred Smith.

She was captivated by the park the first time she saw it, in the 60s. I did the same thing that you did. I brought my son, and I actually took a picture of him on HiHo Silver up here, because Fred wanted people to appreciate his park, and he built HiHo Silver without glass on the horse, except on the very front. Arto didn't get the chance to play Lone Ranger on his horse Silver. Benjamin didn't want him playing so close to the cars zooming by. Fred built his park right up to the road's edge. He wanted people

to notice. He even added two sculptures of raving tourists. Two of our visitors, maybe they were our first tourists, pointing to the sign that Fred would write and tell about our area. Because the road went right by, he wanted to connect with the road. He wanted to bring visitors here. He wanted to tell them about things. Fred had a grand vision about life in the Northwoods. And in order to communicate it with others, he drew from local, national and even fictional stories. There is a statue of a woman standing in a chariot driving a team of horses, fully inspired by the film Ben-Hur.

He was very excited to see the Ben-Hur movie, but he took from his own experiences because there was a woman in town at the time that would drive her horses by standing on their backs. Fred could not read or write, so visual culture was a great source of inspiration. He embraced TV, and he embraced the Life magazine because it was something that had large pictures. Fred was born in 1886. He began working in his early teens at the lumberjack. He had been a logger. He led a full life in the woods, working hard with his hands.

We think he might have been a cook. He never truly retired, though. In his old age, on this site, he built and ran a bar. And this bar provided him with most of the glass he needed for his sculptures. His neighbors would bring him glass as well.

Doug Mookie, another member of the Friends of Fred Smith, recalled his grandfather doing this. He would save, like, beer bottles, Hilux bottles, a lot of things came in glass, very little plastic in those days. So he saved those bottles, bring them out here, and Fred was very appreciative of that colored glass. When you look closely at all the glass, you can see just how resourceful Fred was.

He never bought anything. He always, it was recycled things. Recycled from his bar, recycled from Lowe's junkyard. Fred would watch for cars that came in on the truck that would be salvaged, and he'd be the first one over there to get the glass off the car. And you can see as we walk around the statutes, you'll see those particular lenses that are there. In the feathers of some of the Indians, there's some glass that is, it's not bottle glass,

and it may have come from a church. Indians are a huge presence in the park. We don't know for sure what kind of relationships he had with Native Americans, but Fred knew their folklore and history. Perhaps he was inspired by the legendary resourcefulness. He definitely sympathized with their plight. One of Fred's most impressive tableaus is called Woman with Indian. This particular tableau is to commemorate a treaty

between the white people and the Indians. And the reason the Indian is so big is because Fred wanted to emphasize the importance of the Indian in the treaty. So there are a lot of images of Indians around. What did he think that the Indians were so important in the treaty? Well he felt really he was very concerned that the Indians were losing their right to be here and and as we as the European settlers we were taking over their land and they could no longer hunt and live as they had lived before. Fred worried the rural life he knew and loved would also disappear. In the North Garden, there's a statue based on the local character, Mabel the milker. He always said she was the best milker. Fred shows Mabel milking a cow with one hand

and holding a can with the other. He was afraid that people would forget that milk came from cows and it didn't come out of a can or as we use now, out of a bottle. I can't imagine Americans not knowing milk comes from a cow. But how many Americans understand

that physical labor used to be so central to daily life? That's another significant thing, the physical endurance and his age. This is what the friends of Fred Smith are working to preserve and commemorate. I always said that if you didn't appreciate the artistic value of this park, you have to have appreciation for the physical activity and endurance it took to build these structures at his age. After his encounter with America, Tocqueville predicted the future for art in democracy. He wrote,

I do not believe that it is a necessary effect of a democratic social condition and of democratic institutions to diminish the number of those who cultivate the fine arts. But these causes exert a powerful influence on the manner in which these arts are cultivated. The productions of artists are more numerous, but the merit of each production is diminished. No longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant. An appearance is more attended to than reality. After my encounter with the concrete environments of Paul, Mathilda, Fred and Nick, I believe Tocqueville's vision was limited. Of course, at first you can see cosmologies of the unrefined, puzzles

of debris and shuffling visions. But this is an art born out of time, endurance and physical joy. Labour as an artistic gesture. Not art brut, art of the Brutes You've been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything This installment is called Concrete and Respect Wisconsin, Part 1 This episode was produced by myself This installment is called Concrete and Respect, Wisconsin, Part 1. This episode was produced by myself and Mathilde Biot, with help from Andrew Calloway.

Special thanks to Melania Kroos and all the folks we met in Wisconsin. I put up a number of images and links on the TOE website. You can find that at toe.prx.org. Some support for this Wisconsin miniseries comes from the Kohler Foundation, the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, and JMKAC and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can find all of them at radiotopia.fm

or just search for Radiotopia wherever you get your podcasts.