Content area
Full text
Contemporary Outsider Art
Figure 1.
August Walla, 1998.
Figure 2.
August Walla's room in Gugging.
August Walla was born in Klosterneuburg, Austria, in 1936. During the Nazi era his mother raised him as a girl, hoping to spare her son being drafted into war one day. Later he became aware of his male identity. Looking back on his childhood, he decided that the Russian occupants must have operated on him, turning him into a 'Russian boy'. So he used the swastika as symbol of being female and hammer and sickle, 'communism', or 'Russian' for being male.
For many years Walla lived in a small apartment together with his mother, during summer in a cottage on the Danube's floodplain a finally, after they lost their apartment in a dilapidated casern. In 1983, Leo Navratil and I offered him and his mother a room at the Centre for Art-Psychotherapy, since 1986 House of Artists in Gugging. Walla lived and worked there until his death in 2001.
'First there was the written word' would fit to his world. He did not speak much. He communicated by writing everything he wanted to tell on his objects, streets and walls. And his art works brim over with words, emblems and symbols. They are often centred on his self-made polytheist philosophy: a mysterious world populated by spirits with the prospect of a far-away Universe-End-Land, which may be either the realm of the dead, paradise, limbo or the great nothingness. The Universe-End-Land marks the...