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

The Trash Creations of Dinaa Amin

More at her YouTube channel.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Jan 17, 2021 - Comments (1)
Category: Garbage, Trash, Waste and Other Detritus, Inventions, Outsider Art

The Umbrellaship

The creator's website.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Jan 15, 2021 - Comments (2)
Category: Eccentrics, Outsider Art, Transportation

I Took a Trip (On a Gemini Spaceship)

The creator's Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Nov 02, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Eccentrics, Music, Spaceflight, Astronautics, and Astronomy, Outsider Art, 1960s

Dickens 44 Bascom, Glue Artist

Dickens 44 Bascom is a "glue artist" or "gluer" who rose to prominence in the 1960s. One of his most famous pieces was a 1961 Ford Falcon to which he glued just about everything you could imagine: a typewriter, toilet seat, toys, Donald Duck, and other "relics of our civilization". It was one of the first cars ever decorated in this fashion (perhaps the first). He used to earn money by parking it on a busy street and collecting donations from passersby.

Later he hatched a dream of building an entire castle from glued-together stuff. But, as far as I know, his castle project never came to fruition.

Pittsburgh Press - Mar 3, 1974

According to the Marin Independent Journal, Bascomb left the US in 1981 and lived abroad for almost four decades, in a kind of self-imposed exile, before returning a few years ago. As of 2018, he was living in a motel in San Rafael.

His middle name, "44", was given to him by his father because he was born 44 minutes after 4 am on the 44th day of 1944. (I'm sensing a recurring theme of artists with numbers for middle names, since we recently posted about Nancy 3. Hoffman who operates the Umbrella Cover Museum in Maine).

More info: Dickens44.com

Posted By: Alex - Sat Oct 03, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Art, Outsider Art, Cars

S. P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden

The oldest surviving outsider art installation in the USA.

Home page.

Creator's Wikipedia entry.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Aug 16, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Art, Outsider Art, Statues and Monuments, Regionalism, 1900s

Las Pozas

When travel resumes, here's a destination alluring to any WU-vie.



Read more on the creator here.

His Wikipedia entry.

Posted By: Paul - Thu May 21, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Art, Outsider Art, Surrealism, Eccentrics, Twentieth Century

The Trouble Shooter

Posted By: Paul - Tue Apr 28, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Ineptness, Crudity, Talentlessness, Kitsch, and Bad Art, Technology, AI, Robots and Other Automatons, Outsider Art, Surrealism, Cartoons, 1950s

Possibly in Michigan

A recent article in the NY Times describes how artist Cecelia Condit’s weirdo 1983 short video “Possibly in Michigan” is finding a new audience via social media site Tik Tok.


Condit describes her video as “A musical horror story about two young women who are stalked through a shopping mall by a the cannibal named Arthur.”

Posted By: Alex - Sun Nov 10, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Movies, Outsider Art, 1980s

Charles Bowers

And one more.

His Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Sep 29, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Movies, Cartoons, Stop-motion Animation, Special Effects, Outsider Art, Surrealism, Twentieth Century