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August Walla |
NAVRATIL (Leo). Gugging 1946-1986, Brandstätter, Vienna, 1997.
NAVRATIL (Leo). Walla. Sein Leben & seine Kunst. Greno, Nördlingen, 1988.
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| August Walla is an only child. After his father's death, he becomes very close to his mother. | ||
| Weak and unable to fend for himself, he does not adjust well to school where other children make fun of him. He writes on one of his notebooks: "All that is red is diabolic." | ||
| He is soon admitted into a specialized institution. When he is nine years old, he goes through the terrifying experience of not sleeping for three months. | ||
| When he is sixteen, he threatens to hang himself and sets fire to the attic of his house. He is diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized for the next four years (1952-1957). | ||
| In the 70s, Walla enters the Gugging hospital. He is constantly afraid of death, God and other human beings. His fears and anxieties are mixed with an obsession about his mother. She is, in his mind, his only protection from the outside world. He is afraid of losing her and threatens to commit suicide if she dies. He visits her every day in the geriatric department of the hospital. The walls of his room are entirely covered with those mythical figures and enigmatic symbols that are part of his imaginary world. | ||
| Early on, he collects objects picked out of garbage found on the streets. He brings them back to life by covering them with indecipherable inscriptions. Sometimes, he even paints on trees or on roads. He then takes pictures of these imaginary landscapes. He collects dictionaries of foreign languages, he also collects words from Latin, English, Russian, Indonesian, Japanese, etc. He invents new ones by combining them as he wishes: for instance, "Saeculacalxdiabolus" means the devil of eternity. A beautiful handwriting has for him a magic signification as well as an aesthetic effect. Some letters have a mythological meaning and Walla calls them "sacred symbols". | ||
| He also changes the tone of a letter to give it a personal meaning. He rolls, for example, one of the legs of "H" inside so that it becomes for him a symbol of hell. | ||
| The political insignias that cover his drawings should be read as part of his mythology. The swastika represents the female gender, the hammer and the sickle the masculine. Walla believes that he was a woman during Hitler's regime, and he became a man only later, through what he calls a "Russian operation". | ||
| These two symbols exemplify the struggle for sexual identity as well as the fight between National Socialism and communism. In many of his self-portraits, one can see him holding the symbol of hell in his right hand. He sometimes portrays himself as Hitler, or as a "Communist commander". Walla's world is complex on many levels; he brings together elements in a way that we would not think of to create a world that resembles no one else's. | ||
| He works relentlessly until the page is all covered. His drawings testify of the fear of space. In other words, empty space is felt like a threat, the threat "letting through" a "malignant look" that would annihilate everything. | ||
| SEE ALSO: Publications de la Collection de
l'Art Brut, fascicule 12, Gugging, Lausanne, 1983. NAVRATIL (Leo). Gugging 1946-1986, Brandstätter, Vienna, 1997. NAVRATIL (Leo). Walla. Sein Leben & seine Kunst. Greno, Nördlingen, 1988. |
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