Smash Group of Akron, Ohio (1960)

Picasso lived to 104, Brancusi to 101 and Georgia O’Keefe didn’t give up her creative ghost until three days after her 100th birthday. They’re gone, but if you can find some equivalently antique remnant - in a tender care facility in the Hamptons - try an experiment. Whisper just three words directly into their hard to hear ears, and watch their gaze mist over. “Ah, yes,” might sigh the dodderer who once welded steel plates the size of locomotives. “Oh, them,” might sigh the biddy who had sex with a giraffe in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art until she was arrested for public obscenity and the traumatized camelopard was sent to the zoo. Who do these wizened revolutionaries remember with a fondness verging on reverence? What were the words you’d whispered? The Smash Group.

Founded in Akron, Ohio circa 1960, this loose bunch prefigured every contemporary artistic trend from textile art to found art to conceptual and performance art. But as the members marched fearlessly forward, they may have taken a quick peek in the rear view mirror to glimpse their dearly departed Dada.

Legend, which so much of the Smash Group story is, deems Carla Idiberry the primal Smasher. Almost, but not quite. Idiberry, born circa 1940, was surely the single most essential figure, but she wasn’t the first. That was Hans Fellsheimer, a refugee from post-WWII Germany who landed in Akron for no reason that anyone knows. The elderly Nazi worked as a shop teacher in the local high school where he carved street signs with a conceptual bent.

Fortunately, Carla Idiberry was a substitute teacher in that same school when she wasn’t working at her family’s small factory, Idiberry Hubcaps [1].

Yet it wasn’t Fellsheimer’s larger works that impressed Carla; rather it was his pocket-sized “animaloids.” We have some of Carla’s words here [2] but no images, and none of the creatures appear to have sold during the heyday of the group. Instead, we’re left with a partial interview and the dubious claims of Boris Findish’s iconic The Smash Group, an Exhibition to speculate about the talismanic power these objects exerted over Idiberry

By all accounts a beauty, and later on a talent, Idiberry was a Walter Pater-like [3] proselytizer of art for art’s sake. Also art as a quasi-religious experience and, most significant, of art as a way to escape Akron.

Carla drew art forth from others like a douser does water, but couldn’t make her own until, one night, alone in her family factory, she began banging metal in frustration. Friends later joked that the world was lucky she didn’t become a musician, but the battered, screwed, glued and welded pieces of tin, steel and, especially copper became her signature.

Charismatic Carla’s first convert was her best friend since third grade. LaLane (originally Lilly) Watson, a fierce and awkward orphan whom a fellow student once described as “an accident waiting to happen.” Or an artist waiting for Carla to happen.

LaLane received an associates degree and began working as a nurse’s aide at Belcher Hospital. One of the first to exhibit, LaLane called upon her foster shame at having to wear other children’s clothing to become a pioneer of what was later called “fabric art.” [4]

Hip bone to thigh bone to knee bone, the group grew. Carla brought in LaLane and LaLane brought along her boyfriend, William “Ack Ack” Huxtable or “Hux” to whom the inevitable accident occurred. [5]

Ack Ack, 1936 - 1962, may have been the least naturally skillful member of the Smash Group, but was nonetheless a significant figure, if only because he inadvertently enlisted Reese Bulgar, 1945 - 1969, at a fabled pool game that led to both of the players’ brief incarceration in the Akron hoosegow. Prior to that, however, Ack Ack tried paint and sculpture and failed at both. Then he drove his car off the road onto a glass mountain behind a factory that produced side windows for Dodge. [See: Note 1.]

It was a miracle that Ack Ack, flayed by the shards of glass like a medieval saint, survived. Yet his trauma also provided his inspiration. Confined to his hospital bed, he began sketching installations of massive windows set into the ground like tombstones.

Reese, a delinquent reputedly related to Akron’s greatest commercial fortune [6] and Carla began a years long, on and off romance, during which she invited him to join the movement. Legend, that old stalwart, has it that he laughed, “Art has to be easier than stealing motorcycles, so why not?” And yet, like so many other Smashers, Bulgar’s art was not only brilliant but anticipatory. His “explodables” prefigured both Chris Burden’s “Shoot” and the Happenings of the late 60’s. Most of Bulgar’s static works are in private collections that refuse to acknowledge their presence. Bulgar himself left Akron to New York where he took up radical politics and died while constructing a bomb intended to go off in Macy’s.

Soon after these core four individuals commenced to produce their various objets d’art, they found or were found by the man who would bring them to renown.

Maybe Jimmy Steel, nee something else, empathized with the Group because he loathed his job as an underpaid assistant in a gallery that specialized in portraits of patrons’ children and landscapes by the yard. Or maybe he had finer ideas in mind. Either way, a bond was forged at the Bail/Bond Gallery located in a former police across the Cuyahoga River from downtown.

Jimmy was, like his artists, a pioneer, establishing his business in a dilapidated, nearly abandoned, industrial district. Before loft life came to Soho in New York and Soma in San Francisco and Soberne in Switzerland, it was pioneered in Akron.

Later, when several of the Smashers came to New York, Andy Warhol humbly acknowledged, “You were the first.” [7]

Was there something in Akron’s air - aside from smog - that led to this efflorescence? Did the members of the Smash Group become friends - or lovers, or rivals - because of their common genius? Or did genius emerge from their common situation?

First, however, people had to know them, and prior to the profiles in the New Yorker, to the Whitney Biennials and Venice Biennales, there was a single anonymous columnist for the Akron Beacon who called his column “The Educated Eye.” He inadvertently christened the phenomenon when he reviewed the Bail/Bond’s first group show and deemed it “smashing.”

After that, the group expanded to include Jeff Gille, 1948-1963, furniture designer deluxe, and his cousin, Tierney Swan, 1945 - 1979, who many considered the most brilliant of the gang. She was surely the sexiest and, sadly, the most self-destructive. Heroin overdose. Legend, our old friend, suggested that she was romantically involved with a European nobleman who secretly funded the Bail/Bond.

Tierney played another important role when she gave Samuel Delgado the name under which he became famed - Slap Dash. Samuel was a Dominican immigrant slotted for a major league baseball career when a freak accident damaged a finger he required to pitch. Instead of a stadium, he ended up working in the Idiberry family factory, where Carla recruited him for her art gang. Yet he was too poor to afford paint, so he used other artists’ empty paint cans as structural elements. He fell from a Fifth Avenue rooftop party celebrating his latest work, “Yellow Bridge.”

Like Slap, many of the Smash Group tended to quasi-industrial collage, because none of them had any but the most rudimentary abilities in traditional media. For example, the Zollo twins, painted trees in the forest, then photographed them, then cut off branches, then combined the photos and the cuttings for their shows. The Zollos died together when a gas heater in their studio malfunctioned.

Aside from their age, their location and the physical nature of their art, two further traits can be discerned in most of the Smash Group members. First, many of them changed their names, or adopted noms d’art. Second, almost all of them died curious deaths. One might call them suspicious. Everyone except Carla whom no one has heard from in the decades since their glory days in Akron.

Nowadays the group is all but forgotten, except by the aged who wonder what would have happened if the Smash Group survived. Would they have faded anyway, like the Zebrists or the Fortunata, or might they have attained a permanent apogee?

*

Footnotes:

1. Fortune: February 16th, 1957: “Akron, the Town that Makes what Detroit Sells” viz. also: Crescent Glass Corp.

2. Conversation between Elsa Tbatchnik and Carla Idiberry for Scroll Magazine, Spring 1964. T: “Please tell me more about these pieces that excited you.” I: “They were small. Smooth. They had a semblance of facial structure and limbs, but none were fully articulated. Imagine a drawing that’s been half-erased. Now make that a sculpture.”

3. In Further Studies on the Renaissance, 1876, Pater declared that the sheer aesthetic enjoyment was not merely sufficient, but abundant. “He who requires more is a lesser man,” he said. No mention of women.

4. Milliken Textile Center exhibit, autumn 2021, “From Salome to Calvin Klein, Two Millennia of Design.”

5. Buckeye Blotter, 1958: “Sometime between midnight and 2:00 a car veered off Rte 74 and entered the yard of the Crescent Glass yard where the company kept its waste in a fourteen foot high heap of broken glass. The driver, William Huxtable age 26, was taken to Belcher Hospital with injuries over most of his body. There’s no indication that alcohol was involved."

6. Akron Bugle: September 21st, 1959 “Russoffs Department Store, anchor of Jernel Square, celebrates its 30th Anniversary.”

7. Conversation overheard at the Gilded Grape near Times Square, 1976. Diaries of Kenneth Jay Lane, who also noted that one of the performers “nicked Andy’s wallet.” Or maybe Andy didn’t feel like paying that night.