Fishhooks in the Memory

At first glance, the constructions of H. C. Westermann seem as innocent as something made for a child. Many of them look like dollhouses and, like dollhouses, have doors that open and windows to peer through into magical interiors where tiny figures go about their unknown business. But wait. Take the centerpiece of a comprehensive show of Westermann's work mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum. Its title is the first eye opener: Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea. The figure's mouth is an angry gap, its nose vaguely phallic, its ears two wooden plugs, its body a cupboard. When a viewer (avoiding the museum's watchful guard) opens the cupboard door, he finds a tiny armless man dangling head down from a trapeze. Beneath, a ship is sinking in a sea of bottle tops. A savage commentary on the condition of man? A joke? If it is a joke, it is one in which the viewer does not quite get the point. But it leaves him feeling that it may be his fault.

Sometime Gandy Dancer. Just why this should be, Westermann himself is unable to explain. He is an avowed anti-intellectual who insists that he never reads books. At 46, he still likes to stand on his hands with a cigar in his mouth. After all, he was once a professional acrobat--and he likes cigars. The son of a Los Angeles accountant, he took off as a youth for the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. Since then, he has worked as a carpenter, plasterer and handyman, fought as a Marine in two wars before hitting upon his present trade. Today, he lives with his second wife Joanna, daughter of Industrial Designer Lester Beall, and works in the front room of the cottage they live in on Father Beall's gentlemanly farm in Brookfield Center, Conn.

During his knockabout years, Westermann acquired an irreverent imagination and a keen respect for craftsmanship. The Last Ray of Hope is a highly polished pair of workman's boots (he spent two weeks polishing them) set on a platform of linoleum foil and enclosed in an immaculately machined glass box. They suggest a display in the front window of some country store with a cracker barrel and iron stove in side. The title apparently has some obscure relevance in Westermann's mind to his reverence for honest workmanship. Says Westermann: "I think they are beautiful. They're comfortable and give your ankles support." Wet Flower is his imagination at its most antic. Stylized flowers droop over a stone inscribed: "The pain and glory are half the story, the rest being rain." Droplets of clear plastic drip on the inside of the glass. "It's a flower on a rainy day seen through a window," he says.

Masked Innocence. His imagination takes another turn with Burning House. Topped by a Dairy Queen turret, it stands on spindle legs like a kind of stylized cockerel. A .mirrored slot is its front door, a bell tolls the alarm from its innards, and brass flames flick from its windows. A viewer can peer past them to discover a drawing of a grotesque dragon and miniature ladders leading to invisible upper rooms from which there is obviously no escape. What does it mean? "I have no idea," says Westermann. "I cam build a thing, but I can't nail down what it is about. I don't know what it means. I guess that must mean I'm nuts."

Of course he is nothing of the sort. His innocence is only a mask for a settled malice directed against a society that he thinks has gone mad. He keeps a punching bag in his studio, and every once in a while "beats the hell out of it." His visual jokes are intuitional and may indeed have no rational point. But they end up as a kind of emotional fishhook, snagged in the memory. They are images not wholly explicable, but impossible to dislodge.

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