Outsider Art

Vanilla Ice at Coral Castle

Apparently, no one knows how Leedskalnin managed to build, manipulate and then transport his huge coral sculptures. After all, he was a small man using tools jerry-rigged from an old Ford truck. 

It was the publicity photo that interested me when I got Vanilla Ice's new CD, Hard to Swallow, in the mail. The CD I was skeptical about. But the photo featured a scowling Rob Van Winkle draped in a stole of Spanish moss and hunkered down in front of a huge stone crescent moon rising in the background. A bell went off. I was sure that primitive moon was outsider art--a crazy place I'd read about called Coral Castle, 25 miles south of Miami. I had to check photos in John Beardsley's Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists, to be sure. Judging from Beardsley's pix, Ice was sitting in a large carved throne in the middle of the castle grounds, which is littered with heavy tables and chairs. That crescent is the centerpiece of the place, rising behind the throne. I knew I had to talk to Vanilla Ice about it, sure I was the only person who'd recognize the place and be on a rock publicist's mailing list!

The Coral Castle was built by Edward Leedskalnin between 1920, after he was jilted in his native Latvia and immigrated to the US, and when he died in 1951. Leedskalnin evidently built the sculptures by hand and in secret, using an unknown method, in Florida City, Florida. Then he moved them clandestinely by himself to their current location, near Homestead, Florida, 10 miles away. The material is coral rock, hard to work with but plentiful in South Florida. Apparently, no one knows how Leedskalnin managed to build, manipulate and then transport his huge coral sculptures. After all, he was a small man using tools jerry-rigged from an old Ford truck. Leedskalnin built walls, a house, a 20 foot obelisk and even a "Feast of Love Table," shaped like Florida state, where he hoped the governor and state leaders would meet. He called the place Rock Gate Park, but the name was changed by later owners. 

When Ice says they're really not special, he's right in a way--the things are blocky, primitive and rather ugly. The miracle is that they were built at all. Leedskalnin had a vision of making a special home for himself and his would-be bride, who refused to join him in his new home. One of the highlights of the Coral Castle is a huge door, weighing 9 tons, that is so skillfully made and counterweighted that it can literally spin with little applied force. The Castle is one of those Stonehenge-type places that are weird and mysterious and kind of creepy--except we know a little of Leedskalnin's motives for building. He wrote a few pamphlets about his work and intentions, and one book A Book in Every Home, even outlines his philosophy of life and discusses the lost love that inspired his masterwork. Another book, Magnetic Current, summarizes his ideas on magnetic particles. Nonetheless, he took the secrets of how he carved and moved that coral rock to his grave.

[Vanilla Ice mentions Vizcaya as another strange tourist attraction in South Florida. Vizcaya is another castle--a real one, modeled on a sixteenth-century Italian villa, and built by International Harvester founder James Deering, in the years before Leedskalnin arrived in the US. Coral Castle is the opposite of Vizcaya--poor and weird and singular rather than rich, opulent and a copy of a historical model.]

It's possible that Vanilla Ice--or photographer and image maker Dean Karr--felt that associating Ice with Coral Castle would send a subliminal signal of authenticity and genuine rolex replica watches creativity as part of Ice's comeback package, opposed to the carefully crafted fictional media-image of the "Ice Ice Baby" years. It's possible but unlikely because I might be the only person in the world who'd get a Vanilla Ice CD in the mail and be able to identify the background of the publicity photo. Ice's publicist even told me that Ice had insisted on the crescent moon photo rather than the one the company picked; this is the only b&w publicity shot--all the others are in color. 

It's possible that Vanilla Ice wanted to link himself with a grass roots artist because he also wants to fake rolex be seen as real. But when I talked to him, he was genuinely enthusiastic about the Coral Castle, and talked about it readily and knowledgeably. There wasn't a trace of star trip or rock ego going on--no defensiveness or guardedness or artifice. Talking to Rob Van Winkle, a.k.a. Vanilla Ice, was like talking to a friendly guy you'd meet in a bar, and a lot better than omega replica talking to some other rock musicians.
 

Coral Castle bibliography:

Michell, John. The Consolation of a Jilted Latvian, in Eccentric Lives & Peculiar Notions. NYC: HBJ, 1984, pp84-88.

Wilkins, Mike, et al. The New Roadside America. NYC: Fireside, 1992, pp238-239.
 

Getting there:

Coral Castle
28655 South Dixie Hwy
Homestead, FL 33030
(305) 248-6345
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Interview with Vanilla Ice (aka Rob Van Winkle)

December 2, 1998

MOLE: It's the one where youre sitting there and there's a big crescent shaped thing in the background.
ICE: Yeah, that's here in Miami at the Coral Castle. Do you know where that is?

MOLE: I just know it's south of Miami. I've never been there.
ICE: Yeah, exactly. It's called the Coral Castle. This guy just made his castle. A lot of people don't know how he did his stuff; it's amazing. They're still trying to figure out how he did it today. There's all these sculptures around--its pretty cool.

MOLE: Who chose that site as the place where the photo would be taken?
ICE: Dean Karr.

MOLE: Who's he?
ICE: He's the guy who shot all the Marilyn Manson videos and Dave Matthews videos.

MOLE: Did you know about it prior to that?
ICE: Yeah, yeah. He asked me what was a few places and I kinda ran off a few. One of those I mentioned was the Coral Castle, among other things, and he said "Yeah, I heard about that." So they got here from LA and they hooked up with an agency or something that tells them all the sights and different things to do. So we picked that one.

MOLE: What made you want to use that site? What put it on your list?
ICE: Well, cause I'd never been there before, first of all. To see it and check it out. See what Dean was seeing, because Dean has a way of fixing people up, so to speak, like a lot of the Marilyn Manson wardrobe and stuff was done by Dean; he invented a lot of that stuff. He's good at doing that kind of stuff--he took Dave Matthews down to the Amazon and dressed him up. And I didn't want to be dressed up like he'd done these other things, because this was a little different. I wanted to get away from that. I just went down there to see what he was seeing, and I had to let him know and converse with him and stuff: This isn't Dave Matthews or Marilyn Manson, so don't try to dress me up as something that I'm not. So we just made it happen. I told him I don't like posing too much, or anything unreal. I just wanted to be real.

MOLE: Is that one reason you chose that site, because of something in that art?
ICE: Well, it's here, it's in Miami, and this is my hometown. This is a great place to do it.

MOLE: Did you shoot a video at Coral Castle?
ICE: No, no, just the photos.

MOLE: What did you think of the sculptures?
ICE: Aw, I think it's great. It's totally killer. I was amazed at all this stuff and how he did it himself. I didn't know there was so much to it until I got there.

MOLE: Can you describe some of it?
ICE: It's nothing really huge exciting, it's intriguing trying to figure out how this guy made this door that weighs twenty something tons. And you can touch it with your pinkie and spin it, and it'll spin around six or seven times before it stops, because of the weight. Nobody can figure out how he did this, how he got it there and how he even cut this coral to make it all form like this. Its all real coral and its a castle made of it. Nobody knows how he did it. He died with the secret. Now he left everybody trying to figure it out. So that's the attraction.

MOLE: That's pretty wild. Is it big?
ICE: No, it's pretty small, actually. Not huge or anything.

MOLE: The pictures I've seen of it, it's filled with all these tables and chairs.
ICE: It's got tables, chairs, moons and stuff. You just got to see it; it's different, you know.

MOLE: What's the story with the guy who built it? Do you know anything about that?
ICE: Not really. They give you a little bit of information out there, but some guy supposedly built this place for his wife, he built it by hand--all handmade--and a lot of people can't figure out how he did this stuff and I think he died and took the secrets to the grave, like I said.

MOLE: How often have you been there since then?
ICE: Just once; that's the only time I've ever been there.

MOLE: You've never taken your kid out there?
ICE: No, not yet.

MOLE: You think she'd like it?
ICE:  Aw, she'd love it, I'm sure, when she gets old enough to understand what things are. She's only a year old now.

MOLE: That's mostly what I wanted to talk to you about--that one photo and what you knew about it. It's pretty cool that you put it on your list as one of the places you wanted pictures taken at. Are there other sights like that down there?
ICE: Well, there's all kinds of things. There's Vizcaya here, and all kinds of historical things down here, but nothing like the Coral Castle. There's not another one or anything like that here. That's pretty much the only one I know of. There's nothing really special about it--I mean, there is something special, but when you get there it's not like a real big deal. It's pretty neat. It's interesting--if you're into history, and how things are made, and stuff. [Talks to someone on his end.] Yeah, Penny Camp. At Penny Camp here you go scuba diving and they have these underwater statues. They have Jesus, I think, huge. You swim around it. And an underwater hotel--you scuba dive down and spend the night there and everything. That's amazing.

MOLE: Do you think the photos turned out pretty well with that big moon thing? Do you like those?
ICE: Yeah, totally. It was good.We had to simmer Dean down a little bit from going wild like he can, and he had his vision. I didn't want to interrupt it too much, so I let him do his thing, but I just didn't want it to get carried away like Marilyn Manson and dress me up all crazy. It was cool. Dean's a great guy to work with, a good friend of mine.

MOLE: How tall is that moon thing that's behind you? Is that really tall?
ICE: Yeah. You'd have to climb up there. It must be six feet sitting on top of a wall that's about nine feet, so it's twenty feet in the air.

MOLE: And how high are you? You're sitting in a chair--
ICE: Yeah, he was down so it made me look big. I'm sitting in this chair; I was probably around eight feet high in the air and that chair's like straight down.

MOLE: Actually, that's all I wanted to talk to you about.
ICE: Wow. So what's the magazine about?

MOLE: Well, lately I've been covering a lot of free jazz; I'm really into that.
ICE: It's a music magazine?

MOLE: Mostly it's a music magazine.
ICE: Yeah, because I've never done an interview where they asked me about stuff like that! This is pretty cool! [laughs]

MOLE: It's because I do a lot of outsider art stuff. I just interviewed an outsider artist Clyde Jones in Chapel Hill, who builds animals out of wooden logs with chainsaws. He's about seventy now. I see a lot of links between punk rock and outsider art and free jazz, so I try to cover that. There's a similar mindset going on, I think. When I saw this photo of you with this sculpture, I thought I knew where it was, so I really wanted to talk to you about it. And then I read a bunch of articles about you in the Washington Post and Washington City Paper, and they all say the same things about the comeback and how you're a sell out. So I really wanted to follow up on this outsider art idea.
ICE: That's great. I really appreciate this. This is like a total change. I've never done an interview like this in my life. I'm looking forward to the magazine. Thanks for having me.
END