rolltown
accidental, industrial sculpture
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Where is Rolltown?
IT IS A PLACE.
Carrollton, Georgia (a.k.a. Rolltown), on first blush, is just another small, sleepy, conservative Southern town of Sunday worship and boiled peanuts. Visit it today, and you could hardly imagine it as as some roiling (rolling?) maelstrom of renegade artistic creation.
Yet this way-station one hour west of greater Atlanta became just that: the most unlikely of testing grounds, a psychedelic laboratory in which the artists featured on this site (and in this most curious retrospective) hammered out their own aesthetic visions in rebar and various grades of cement, even as they shared—if only for those tantalizingly brief years—the same, west-Georgia, red-clay foundations.
Who is Rolltown?
IT IS A GROUP OF RAGTAG ARTISTS.
Alfred Accidentalists, Haralson County Brutalists, Accidental Earthworks sculptors, and all of their precursors: these splintered sub-groups somehow coalesced into one of the most amazing and productive artistic movements of the closing of the third quarter of the twentieth century in the American South.
Canonical figures such as the aristocratic Marge Trilot, the Swiss-inspired Franz Emmettel, the self-destructive Gianni Enzo, the back-to-nature industrialist Terry Wintrell, or the enigmatic non-entity of Werner Shelt: these and many more found behind Carrollton's conservative veneer, a smoldering foundry of aggressively progressive social theory and metallurgy.
What is Rolltown?
IT IS A BOOK.
Rolltown is the only retrospective of west-Georgia Accidental-Industrial sculpture ever produced. The first edition, published in 1975 (in Italian) was the obsessive labor-of-love of two Italian art critics/adventurers awash in the riches of Carrollton's High Accidentalism.
Ten years later, the first English-language version of that classic retrospective finally came to fruition. Since then, nothing. What's more, internet searches turn up few extant copies of the 1985 translation, much less of the original. Who (or what) has worked to obliterate this book, once considered a nearly canonical part of American industrial arts, from cultural memory?
It is our hope that readers interested in both the artworks here but also in the political unrest and, at times, inscrutable intrigue evident behind the narrative (the text within the text) will help us build enough momentum to force (forge?) into being a third edition, one that may reintroduce to the wider public those artists who once comprised the pantheon of High Accidentalism in west Georgia: Marge Trilot, Ino Ijito, Sydney Tolliver, Patricia “Razz” Rasmussen, and all the rest—names once analogous with challenging works in pig iron and rare concrete aggregates, names responsible for recalibrating what was possible by accident and acetylene torch.
When is Rolltown?
IT IS A TIME.
1968-1974: the era of Vietnam, Nixon, psychedelia, and Jiffy Pop sent shockwaves even through placid Carrollton. And perhaps nowhere else in that small town were those shockwaves felt more fully than on the campus of the University of West Georgia (née West Georgia College), known at the time—for its increasingly militant Marxist pedagogical predilections and drugged-up countercultural tendencies—as Left Georgia College.
Student protests erupted there as they did across the nation, but Accidental-Industrial sculpture erupted along with them. Why, then, do current city officials not celebrate their own rich, artistic heritage? Why, if you travel to Carrollton today, are you not met with sculpture gardens, dioramas, Accidental-Industrial-themed restaurants and carny rides?
Thankfully this retrospective (albeit hard to find) still allows us to consider the amazingly sudden, magical efflorescence of the manufacturing-based mayhem scholars call High Accidentalism in west Georgia.
By what measure, however, do we come to understand its equally sudden demise?
Why Rolltown? Why now?
IT IS A MORAL AND ARTISTIC IMPERATIVE.
Imagine a world without Picasso, without Velázquez. Imagine no Nguchi but also no sense of what art could be, could mean, in a completely accidental but aggressively industrial iteration. Imagine a world where sewer grates were just that: dumb metal, homogenous and dead; where the products of American industry remained inert, expected, hopelessly connected to our aging infrastructure. That's the world against which these west-Georgia artists—the Accidental-Industrial behemoths of creation—actively rebelled.
And where did such a noble rebellion land them? In oblivion, in some netherworld of forgotten artistic achievement, squarely in the dustbin of detritus and scrap metal any such Southern town collects and relegates to its landfills and ghastly junkyards.
Sure, the odd Swiss collector, the obscure Japanese temple museum, the well-financed Lubbock Children's Hospital possesses its own prized Accidental-Industrial masterwork, on display as any such curio, some eclectic speck of American industriana. But what of the rest of the world? What of, indeed, Carrollton, Rolltown itself? Forgotten, utterly so.
But it need not be forever. Rolltown need not stop rolling. Indeed with enough momentum, enough outpouring of support (if not of molten steel), it is our hope—we obsessive boosters of this most riveting (and, at times, literally riveted) chapter in American industrial figuration—it is our hope that yet a third edition of Rolltown will once again awaken the rough beast of High Accidentalism, and that Carrollton (if not indeed the world) will once again roll with the power of these latter-day Hephaestuses.
Help us make that happen. Contact us to learn more about how you too can (perhaps intentionally) join this accidental world.