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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's mango.

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My hello there, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. For those of you who don't know me, hello. My name is Lindsay. I am a PhD student in art history, currently in Rome. Uh, and I occasionally, occasionally, manage to get on this thing and tell y'all stuff about some things. I feel like I oh yeah, I'm also writing a dissertation. Forgot to mention that one. Uh, I'm in Rome writing a dissertation, and that's the reason that these episodes are so sporadic, because who knows when I can carve out enough time to research, write, and record them, which takes an obscene amount of time. That being said, if you like the podcast, if you appreciate it, if you listen to it, if you wait for episodes, I so appreciate that. And one way to let me know is by leaving a review on iTunes or, you know, wherever you listen to the podcast. That would be very much appreciated. For today's episode, we are venturing into the world of modern slash contemporary art, depending on how you choose to uh, you know, differentiate those things chronologically. Some people have very strong feelings about it. The topic for today's episode was inspired by a trip that I took in April when Italy opened up interregional travel. Previous to that, we were, um, I don't want to say we were stuck in Rome because that sounds like you can't get stuck in Rome. It's one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's a privilege to be stuck here. But we were all very excited when they opened up interregional travel, and a couple of people rented a car uh and took advantage of that newly opened travel by driving literally two minutes past the border of Lazio, which Rome is located in, to Tuscany, where we spent a lovely day at one of the coolest, weirdest, most beautiful places that I have ever been. Naturally, I wanted to tell you about it, and of course, in doing so, learn about it myself. So without further ado, this is the part where I tell you stuff about a madwoman and her monsters. Nikki de San Fal and the Tarot Garden. In this episode, I'm going to cover a little bit of everything as I am want to do, from Nikki de San Fal's life and career. We'll hit all the big points, and then we'll focus on the conception, creation, and continued flourishing of the Tarot Garden, a project to which Nikki desfal dedicated decades of her life. It was her sort of the culmination of her career. But first, let's spend a little time talking about Nikki desfal herself. Nikki des Saint-Fal was born on October 29th, 1930, near Paris, France, to an American mother and a French father. She was born to an aristocratic family, hence her real name is not Nikki, it's like Catherine Marie Angelefal de Saint-Fal, or something like that. But we will just call her Nikki. When Nikki was born in 1930, her family was very wealthy. I actually think they were technically I don't know if they were literally French aristocracy, but they were very high-class French people. Nikki's family was quite wealthy, but her dad was a banker. And spoiler alert, the 1930s were not a great time for bankers or banking, given that there was a massive economic depression sweeping both France and the USA during that decade. Nikki spent much of her childhood shuttling between the US and France, though her family did have a home in New York City. And let me just say that her childhood was dark. She once referred to her home environment as a child as hell, and she was certainly not exaggerating. I'm not going to go into the specifics here, but there was all kinds of abuse happening at home: physical, emotional, sexual, that was perpetrated in different measure, but perpetrated nonetheless by both her mother and her father. Two of Nikki de Saint Fal's siblings would eventually succumb to suicide, and Nikki herself would struggle with her own mental health for the rest of her life. In addition to the abuse that she suffered at home, Nikki de Saint Fal was also hyper aware of the expectations that both her parents and society had for her as a woman. She would go on to say just how jealous she was of her brother because her parents always encouraged him to go get an education, to sharpen his mind, to have hobbies, etc., etc. Whereas Nikki was raised with one expectation, which was that she would eventually marry a rich man. Over the course of her childhood and much of her life, she was conditioned to believe, as so many people are, but especially in the 1940s and 1950s, that all she had to offer the world was her body, her beauty, and her ability to attract men. The rest of it, her talent, her intelligence, her dreams, those were all secondary if they mattered at all. These ideas and expectations were further reinforced by Nikki de Sunfal's teenage career as a fashion model for huge magazines like Life and even French Vogue. And Nikki de Sunfal was beautiful. I mean, she was gorgeous. She had these really deep set blue eyes, fair skin, fair hair. She was like, if I had to describe her, it's like a mix between Vanessa Petadice and Emily Blunt. It's not an exact science, okay, but if I did have to choose someone to play her in a movie, I would choose Emily Blunt. Thank you very much. As with most teens living in an abusive and troubled home, Nikki often rebelled. And that teenage rebellion, which most often resulted in her getting kicked out of fancy schools, but that teenage rebellion came to a head when she was 18. When she eloped with a childhood friend by the name of Harry Matthews. At the time, marriage seemed like the only way out of a bad situation, which was probably true and was true for many women in the late 1940s and 1950s. But as is often the case, Nikki essentially traded a very bad situation for another, probably slightly less bad but bad nonetheless situation. Part of the difficulty of her marriage, however, was Nikki herself. Because Nikki de Saint-Fal had no interest in being a wife or a mother, and she did become a mother around the age of 21. She didn't really know how to take care of herself, much less anyone else, and she grew increasingly miserable playing the role of 1950s housewife and mother, which were both roles that she played very, very badly. In this time, Nikki did paint, she did write, but all of her efforts were unrecognized. No one took her work seriously, and she became increasingly disillusioned and again, miserable in her life, which had become basically everything that she feared that it would. A couple of years after getting married and having her first child, um, she would eventually have two children, the family moved to Paris, where things got even more dysfunctional. Just to give you a sense of how messy this all got, uh, Harry, so Nikki de Sonfal's husband, Harry, started having an affair with the wife of an English lord. Nikki got super jealous and decided the best reaction to her husband's affair was to, in turn, have an affair with that woman's husband. So Harry is sleeping with the wife of an English lord, and Nikki goes out and finds that English lord, and she starts having an affair with him. Also, this dude was like old and he was shell-shocked from World War II, he had suicidal ideations, like none of this was good. It was all very, very, very bad. Nikki grew increasingly unstable during this time. Um, at one point, physically attacked her husband's mistress, and that somehow led to Harry, Nikki's husband, discovering that Nikki had been hoarding razor blades, scissors, and other sharp objects in her mattress. At which point, Nikki's husband had no choice but to commit her to a mental hospital in Nice, France. This was the part of my research where I couldn't stop thinking about the parallels between Nicky de Saint-Fall and someone like Vincent van Gogh or Vincent van Gogh, depending on where you're from. Both were artists who were deeply troubled and had immense mental health struggles. And those mental health struggles, in many ways, have become glamorized in the scheme of their art, thus perpetuating this myth that artists with mental health issues somehow produce better art. And I think that's a deeply flawed and shall I say intellectually gross way of considering the relationship between mental health, artists, and the work that they make. Alright. Rant over. It is true, however, that Nikki de Saint-Fal considered this period of her life that she spent in the asylum to be a critical turning point in her trajectory as an artist. Later, Nikki desanfal would say, quote, My mental breakdown was good in the long run. I left the clinic a painter. Do keep in mind that she is saying this all in retrospect, because her time at the mental hospital was not a good one, shall we say. I'm sure that she was medicated up to her eyeballs, and we know for a fact that she underwent at least 10 rounds of electroshock therapy. But when she wasn't getting the shit shocked out of her, she was able to explore, to the extent that she was capable of exploring it, the more creative side of herself that she had never been given the space or the time to even really consider or cultivate. And whatever she underwent in the mental hospital did unlock something inside of her. I mean, electroshock therapy probably has a way of doing that to people, though very few of those people, I assume, emerged to become world-famous artists. And spoiler alert, that's what happened. Within a few years of leaving the mental hospital, Nikki Day Sunfall's life changed. Particularly when she decided to leave both her husband and her children in order to pursue a full-time career and calling as an artist. Decisions that she felt were necessary to, you know, achieve this dream that she had, and maybe they were, but they were also decisions, particularly the one to leave her children behind, that would haunt Nikki design fall for the rest of her life. The early 1960s were also the period in which Nicky deshal became much closer to her soon-to-be collaborator, lover, and fellow artist, Jean Tangli, a Swiss-born sculptor best known as a kinetic artist, or an artist who produces sculptures, if you will, with moving components. In particular, Tangli was known for his metamatic sculptures, which in French were simply known as les mathematiques. It's a little bit hard to describe them, but here goes nothing. They're essentially like these metal sculptures. They look like they've been made out of scrap metal. They have an internal, very simple engine that moves the component pieces, and in doing so the pieces either somehow create their own form of art, like drawing in the sand or something, or there were even some that over the passing of time they were designed to self-destruct. Now, if I had to describe these metamatic sculptures, uh, which all of them look different, but if I had to give a general description, I'd say that they mostly look like things you'd find in a burnt-out farm shed. That being said, they're super cool, and we will revisit them shortly. The 1960s marked the blossoming of Nikki de Saint-Fal's career and her life as an artist, some of which was facilitated by her relationship with Tong Li, but also on her own merit. She became friends with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who, for those of you who don't know, are a pretty big deal in the world of modern art. She also met Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali. They all went together to Spain to uh make stuff and then blow it up. So, you know, just your average Spanish holiday. It was in the early 1960s that Nikki started making a series of works that gained a certain amount of renown. These works were known as Tier, or in English, the shooting paintings. Got this super cool French name, and then in English it's the shooting paintings. We couldn't get more creative with that one. But to be fair, it's an accurate description. She made these paintings by embedding all sorts of objects in plaster, usually like domestic objects, along with balloons filled with paint. She would then shoot at these canvases with a rifle, causing all sorts of very weird but very cool results. The paintings kind of look like they're ripped open and bleeding, which I guess they kind of are, considering that they've been shot. There was also a highly performative component to Nikki's shooting paintings, because she would invite people to come along to see the shooting portion. Guests include, again, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, even Jane Fonda. For these events, Nikki would dress up in a tight white jumpsuit, looking like a freaking Bond girl with her 22 caliber rifle. And she kind of was a Bond girl to a certain extent. Not that she was actually a Bond girl, because she wasn't, but she always had this mystique and sexual appeal to her, which she actively cultivated, and it became a kind of cornerstone of her persona. There's all these quotes by Nicki des Saint-Fall about how aware she was of the effect she had on men, that it made her feel powerful, and that she deliberately played into and used that aspect of herself in her life and her art. This hyper-awareness of her own femininity did play into Nikki desanfal's art in a big way, particularly in a motif that appears over and over and over again in her work, known as the Nana, which is a French slang word for woman. What I would assume in the English translation would be something like chick or babe. At its heart, the nana is a figural abstraction of the female body, usually with very pronounced breasts and hips. Nicky de Sansfal produced any number of these figures in sculptural form using varying scales and different degrees of abstraction. Some of them actually look like womenly shapes, and others uh don't. But usually you can look at it and be like, oh yeah, I like I can see this as an interpretation of boobs, you know, like boobs and hips. In addition to these characteristic aspects of the nana, they were also almost always very brightly painted. So ultimately you get this very compelling juxtaposition between volume and shape and rolling contours with these super bright and vibrant colors and patterns. In many ways, it's fitting that the nana has become something of a trademark for Nikki de Saint-Fal because her art, more often than not, was driven by an interest in womanhood, women's problems and struggles, the idea of femininity, the rejection of domesticity. All these ideas that she engaged with could usually be traced back in some way, shape, or form to the condition of being a woman. The Nanas are also very aesthetically representative of Nikki de Saint-Fall's work. I mean, she did produce things like the shooting paintings, which look very different from these massive sculptures, but Nikki desanfal is primarily known for her work in large scale, if not monumental sculpture. One of Nikki desanfal's most famous nanas was one that she made with Jean Tangli in Stockholm that was entitled Han Kathedral, which in Swedish means she, a cathedral. This work was a monumental nana. Now, when I say monumental, I mean monumental. It was a massive sculpture that took the form of a woman on her back with her legs open. And instead of there being any kind of female genitalia between the legs, there was instead a passageway in which you could walk into the inside of this figure, which contained, amongst other things, a 12-seat movie theater, a fish pond, a milk bar, located inside the boob, of course, one of Tongli's metamatic sculptures, a small children's playground slide, a vending machine, a love seats, and a bunch of other stuff. When Han Uncathedral opened in 1966, people really didn't know what to think about it, what to do with it. But it quickly became a huge draw for the museum. And by the time the installation was taken down after three months, over 100,000 people had experienced this work. She, of course, would go on to produce nana figures as well as collaborate more with Tong Li, whom she eventually married in 1971. Now I know that I'm jumping around a bit chronologically, but one of the best-known collaborations between the now husband and wife duo came in the 1980s, when they collaborated on the Stravinsky Fountain near the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which is one of Niki de Saint-Fal's better known works, given its location in a pretty busy part of Paris. The fountain features over a dozen sculptures, including Tongley's metamatic sculptures, which are then complemented by those of Nikki de Saint Fall, all of which was inspired by the music of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. This juxtaposition in many ways reflected Nikki de Saint-Fal and Jean Tongli's relationship, which when you read about it sounds as passionate as it was complicated. Compliqué. But to be fair, one might expect this of a relationship between two very creative, dedicated, and, shall we say, emotionally charged people. No matter how complicated their marriage sometimes became, Nikki and Jean would remain married for the next 20 years, remaining active collaborators and partners in more ways than one. That, my friends, finally brings us to the work of art on which we will focus the rest of the episode. The Tarot Garden. Around 1974, Nikki de Saint-Fall got very, very ill with a pulmonary abscess, which sounds like the worst. And she traveled to Switzerland to recuperate. This was just the first, I mean, to my knowledge, it was the first symptom in Nikki de Saint-Fall's long term battle. With lung disease, which was almost certainly caused by the chemicals and materials with which she worked on a regular basis. She was constantly breathing in chemicals, debris from her work, polyester, I'm sure all kinds of weird stuff in the paint. It was not a good situation. While recuperating in Switzerland, Nikki met up with a longtime friend who she hadn't seen in a while named Morella Caracciolo Agnelli, an Italian socialite descended from Neapolitan nobility. No big deal. It was during this visit that Nikki shared with Morella that she wanted to build a sculpture garden. Now the idea for a sculpture garden had been in Nicki de Sunfall's mind for almost two decades at this point. The inception of the idea can be traced back to 1955, when Nikki first went to Barcelona and saw the works of our dear friend and former podcast subject, Anthony Gaudi. She was especially taken with Parc Gui, which Gaudi had constructed between 1900 and 1914. Of this experience, Nicky de Sansfal said the following: quote, I met both my master and my destiny. I trembled all over. I knew that I was meant one day to build my own garden of joy, a little corner of paradise, a meeting place between man and nature. End quote. It was only in 1974 and that conversation with Marilla Caracciolo Agnelli that things would really get rolling, particularly regarding the theme of the garden, the tarot, which is a type of card deck most often associated with fortune telling, or more generally, the idea of like future prognostication. So just a basic rundown. The tarot deck has 78 cards that are divided into two groups, known as the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana are the cards that are most often associated with Tarot. The Lovers, the Hanged Man, the Empress, the Lightning Struck Tower, etc. There are 22 of those cards, known again as the Major Arcana. The remaining 56 cards in the deck, the Minor Arcana, are divided into four suits, but instead of your usual hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, you've got wands, swords, coins, and cups. When tarot cards were first introduced hundreds of years ago, probably in Turkey, maybe in Italy, I don't know. But when they were first introduced, they were essentially an alternative to just regular playing cards. The modern day usage of tarot cards to quote unquote tell fortunes originated in France just before the French Revolution. That's when things started to get a little like woo-woo. When used in that way to tell fortunes, each card of the tarot deck gets a meeting, with the major arcana representing more momentous aspects of one's life, particularly concerning how we are connected to the world, while the minor arcana represent more localized aspects of our life, like career, money, relationships, etc. Usually, when you get your tarot read, the person shuffles the deck, lays out a number of cards, and then flips them over one by one, reading both the meaning of each individual card in addition to how that card relates to the others and the order in which they were drawn. Now, this is obviously a very simplistic overview of the tarot, but there you go nonetheless. People often have very, very different relationships with the tarot or things like palm reading or you know, whatever the heck. Some people take them very seriously, and others just completely disregard them. I fall somewhere in the middle. I've gotten my tarot cards read a couple of times, not because I think they tell the future. I think that's bullshit. For me, it's more this idea that the future, which does not exist, it's not predetermined, is being actively constructed in the present by the choices that we make, the things that we do, the people with whom we associate. And an outside instrument, like tarot cards, can be very helpful in allowing us to think through those connections, if you will, in a different way. Also, tarot cards, depending on the deck that you find, can be absolutely beautiful. They can be works of art in and of themselves. My fascination with the tarot is probably one of the only qualities that I share with Nikki de Saint Foal, who was very clearly fascinated by the tarot herself. I mean, you don't build something called the Tarot Garden unless you're interested. The biggest obstacle that Nikki de Saint Fall faced when first attempting to get this tarot garden off the ground or into the ground, I don't know what you would say there, was the fact that she had nowhere to put it. Which is like, you know, like that's a pretty big factor in this all. But she didn't have a location. She wanted it to be in an unblemished area of the world that man and industry hadn't touched. She wanted a place where magic and tradition were still alive. She thought about maybe building it in Africa, maybe in South America. But it just so happens that Nicky de San Fall's friend, Marella Caracciolo Agnelli, came from a super loaded family. They ended up giving Nicky de San Fall a 14-acre property in southern Tuscany that was once the site of an Etruscan cave, Etruscans being the ancient civilization of Italy, sort of pre-Rome times. So that was super convenient, like, hey, I have no place to build this thing. Well, hello, here's some land. Thank you very much. Even though the family had seen mock-ups of the garden plans and even miniatures of the sculptures that Nicky day Sunfall planned to create, no one really understood the scale of this project, which was going to be both massive and very, very expensive. Nikki proposed the following: a meeting of nature and art that featured 22 sculptures, each of which would represent one of the major arcana in a tarot deck. Some of these sculptures were absolutely monumental, with heights reaching 15 meters or 50 feet tall and up to 70 feet long. I mean, these are huge. Others were considerably smaller, but to be fair, that's not very hard when the other ones are massive. Massive. The foundations for the garden were laid in 1978, or that's when it was started, with the building of the first sculpture to follow in 1980. Locals who watched the building process often referred to these sculptures as monsters, and it's honestly a pretty fitting description. In addition to seeing the process of these things getting made, the finished products look like things you would encounter in a funhouse or at an amusement park, probably while on an acid trip. Now, to be clear, I've never taken acid, I already have hella anxiety, I don't think that'd be good for me. But one person did describe the tarot garden as a phantasmagoria, which I think is pretty accurate. It's a technicolored dreamscape of benevolent monsters on a hill in the middle of a Tuscan olive orchard. Like it's weird and awesome. And who would make monsters if not a madwoman? This had nothing to do with mental health. They called her mad because who in the world would undertake such a fantastical and seemingly impossible project? A madwoman. That's who. Maybe there's a little bit of a medusa thing happening with some snake-like hair. But it's a very abstract conception of this tarot figure, obviously. The High Priestess eventually became a sort of axial point around which the rest of the sculptures were built. And that makes sense. Not only because it was the first sculpture to be built on the premise, but also because the garden is built on a hill, which results in what is more or less two tiers. There's an upper level and a lower level. The High Priestess acts as a point of connection between those two levels, given that the blue ceramic staircase runs from the mouth of the figure on the upper level to connect it to the basin, the major basin that's on the lower level. And then everything else is sort of like organically pops up around these two focal points of the upper and the lower level. And just to note, uh, in this basin, basically this like fountain area, uh, there is one of Tongli's metamatic sculptures, which stands in for the Wheel of Time, another card in the tarot deck. It's also one of the many Tongli sculptures that appear in this tarot garden. We'll see some others. Don't you worry. As for the other sculptures in the garden, I'm not going to go through everyone, it would take forever, but I'm going to hit the big ones, literally and figuratively. Which for the sculpture garden means basically the same thing. Apart from the High Priestess, one of the more famous sculptures on site is that of the Empress, also known as the Sphinx. The Empress slash Sphinx is one of the best known of the sculptures at the Tarot Garden, because number number one, it's one of the biggest. And number two, it was in this sculpture that Nicky de San Fall lived when she would work at the site. It is literally a house. And you would never really guess that looking at just the exterior, which, you know, takes the form of a sphinx. And a bodacious sphinx at that, a booby-licious sphinx, shall we say. In addition to being absolutely ginormous, the Empress is a smorgasbord of color and texture, with a mane of sparkling blue hair dotted with stars, deep black skin, rainbow-taloned feet, and very large and very multicolored breasts. Aggressively large and multicolored, I think you could say. But I don't mean aggressive in a violent way. Rather in a powerful way. You do not want to mess with this lady. She is not just a mother, she is the mother. She'll whoop your ass if you try anything, so don't even think about it. On the other side of things, though, this is also a very comforting figure. She beckons you to her. She's a nurturer, a protector, a provider. She's safety. And that is precisely what the Empress sculpture was for Nikki de Sunfall, who again literally lived inside this sculpture for years. How she lived in this sculpture, I don't know, because the entire interior is covered in mirror fragments. Yeah, that's right. The entire interior, everything but the floor, is covered in mirror fragments. I have no idea how someone could live in an interior like that, but there was a jacuzzi bathtub. So there's a there's a bit of a give and a take there. The Sphinx also had a bedroom, a kitchen, a dining room, and a bathroom with the aforementioned jacuzzi bathtub installed. In addition to being where Nicki De San Fall would stay when on site, it is a fully functioning home. The Empress also functioned as a kind of headquarters for discussions about the park, meetings with the crew, and all of these things would take place around the dining room table. Over which hangs one of my favorite accents at the park, which is a chandelier designed by Tong Li, featuring a cow skull, some metal bits, and what looked to me like sophisticated Christmas lights. The whole thing is what we shall call a vibe. Inside the Empress, there are also three more Arcana sculptures: the chariot, the star, and the judgment. This is to say that not all of the sculptures were monumental, nor was there a formula for how she approached this garden. Some of the sculptures are super big, some are not so big, some are subsumed into the bigger ones, some have a jacuzzi, some can function as seating, others would hurt your butt if you sat on them. Like there's a there's a big array of what these sculptures were. In addition to the Empress and the High Priestess, the other major works on this upper tier include the Falling Tower, which is a tower that is cracked open at the top to reveal one of Tong Li's metamatic sculptures. You also have the Emperor, which is a two-level structure that you can enter and walk around that has all of these crazy textures and colors and little works of art within this much bigger work of art, and the sheer amount of detail involved in making this is just baffling. It baffles me. The Falling Tower and The Emperor are some of my favorite of the works on I mean, everyone is kind of my favorite in its own way, but these are the ones that remind me most of Gaudi's work in Barcelona. It's like looking at a Gaudi house or Guay Park through a kaleidoscope. It's like Gaudi on steroids, basically. Some of my other favorite sculptures include strength, which is the form of a dragon. Or, well, I guess it's the form of a maiden facing off with a dragon, and you know, good for her and all that. But it's the dragon that is the most aesthetically stunning. It's green, it sparkles, it's a little spooky, but not so spooky, and I love it. The magician is like a face slash mask with a hand coming out of it that's all mirrored and it sits on top of the high priestess. That one's cool. The sun is pretty cool, it looks like a massive bird thing. The hero phant or the pope, that's that's one that there's like a face floating in it. It's crazy. And of course, you know I'm gonna say it. I love the sculpture of death, which pictures a golden skeleton on top of a blue horse fighting off what look like sea creatures on top of a mirrored base. I mean, that's pretty cool. I also really like what Nikki de Sunfall wrote about the death figure within the tarot deck. She wrote, quote, the great mystery of life. Without death, life would have no meaning. Death, the great reaper, allows new blossoms to grow. The card of death is a card of renewal. Being aware of death is a way of not being caught up by the vanities of life. I think that's beautiful. Beautiful. Last but not least of my favorites is the sculpture of justice, which is the form of a very large woman in a black and white striped dress who is holding the scales of justice. They kind of look like her boobs. The reason that I like this sculpture so much is not actually because of this sculpture, but because inside the Justice's skirt is a sculpture by Jean Tongli called Injustice, which is one of the weirdest effing things I've ever seen. It is a machine made from what looks like a bunch of scrap metal. He threw in some skulls of animals like oxen, cows, deer, I'm not sure exactly what they are, but there's skulls involved. There's also a random plastic skeleton just hanging out, looking happy to be part of the program. And as this thing moves, it makes the most horrible noises. It's like the shtick, though, is that this sculpture of Injustice by Jean Tong Li is inside the gated skirts of justice, and there is this massive, almost comical padlock on the door. When I was there, I forgot about this. There was this little kid who was like pulling at this padlock, and I was just watching him being like, dude, you don't want to do that, you don't want to do that. Thankfully, the padlock held because otherwise there would have been a three-year-old child like around rusted metal and carcasses. Would I have saved him? Hmm, we shall never know because the padlock held. Now let's talk building. How in the world do you build these things? Most of the sculptures that you will see in the tarot garden were made using the same method, which was to weld together a steel armature that provided the support and general shape of the work. That was then wrapped in wire mesh and sprayed with granite cement. I like to think of these three steps as the skeleton, which is the metal rebar, the muscles, the mesh, and the skin, the cement. Together, these elements worked to make sure everything was structurally sound. Then the works were decorated. Most of the sculptures are covered in fragments of tile, mirror, glass, ceramics, you name it, if it was colorful or shiny, it was probably used. The process of building these sculptures took forever, as did the process of covering them in these shards of material. Because all of these materials were made or cut on site. They didn't just find a bunch of fragments of stuff and slap them on. It was a very deliberate and thoughtful process. There are other smaller, which again is not to say small, but smaller, sculptures that Nikki de Saint-Fall and her assistants did not fabricate on site, but rather made them in Paris and then shipped them to Italy. But the big stuff was obviously made on site in Italy by a crew of dozens and dozens of people. This crew included a bunch of local people. There's a funny story about how all of a sudden the mail started coming late in the nearby village, and the reason for that was because the mailman, Ugo Caletti, had started to work with Nicki de Sunfall, like laying pathways, doing just little odd jobs around, and then his role actually progressed until he was one of the people laying fragments into the cement sort of exterior of these works. There's also a story of a local boy who was photographing the works as they were being built, and he ended up becoming the kind of official photographer for the park for years, if not decades. This is all to say that the project was very much a collaborative effort, and whatever the locals thought about it at the time, it eventually became like a heartbeat in this area. And let's be real, it continues to be one of the only attractions in the area to this day. While most of the sculptures that appear in the Tarot Garden, even if they're not monumental, they are substantial figures, not all of them look like that. Especially those that Nicky de Saint Fall made later in the process of building the garden. Two examples from the garden are the Hanged Man, which is inside a bigger sculpture, or the Fool, which is on his own. These are sculptures known in Nikki de San Fall's work as skinny sculptures or skinnies, which stood in direct opposition to the Nana and many of the other sculptures that appear in the Tarot Garden. Which is really to say that these sculptures, these skinnies, are more concerned with line than they are with volume. This might be sacrilege. Which might be a little bit sacrilegious, but to me these skinnies look like something you could mock up using pipe cleaners, which you would then obviously translate into much larger forms using what I assume is some kind of coated metal. I'm actually not exactly sure what the skinnies are made of, but that's kind of the gist of what they look like. Nikki de Sunfall started making these particular sculptures, these skinnies, as her lung issues got worse, which was again the direct result of working with polyester and other bad-to-breathe materials. These health struggles catalyzed a new relationship between Nikki de Saint Fall and breathing that manifested itself in the works of art that she produced. Which makes sense, because you know, she couldn't breathe. That is something that's going to change your relationship with air. The issues with Nicky de Saint-Fal's lungs were accompanied by a host of other health issues, including debilitating spells of rheumatoid arthritis, which could leave her bedridden for days at a time, if not longer. She once wrote that these issues rendered her a transparent shadow of herself, and that her hands would become so deformed with arthritis that when her husband saw them, he would simply start to weep. In addition to health issues, Nikki also had your classic financial troubles. At any given time in the construction process, which lasted years and decades, Nikki usually only ever had enough cash on hand for one month's worth of operating costs. And that would have made me nervous. But Nikki de Sansfal was made of sterner stuff. She always found a way to get cash, and she never let her workers know the extent of the financial issues the park was facing. One particularly important source of cash was friends and associates of varying kinds. There's stories of her first husband, Harry Matthews, occasionally paying for a few things here and there, like a shrub bill. There are also stories, which are my favorite, about Jean Tangley just showing up with suitcases full of cash. And also, my tide for my second favorite is the fact that Nicky de Saint-Fal was getting donations from her boyfriend, the fifth Marquess of Normandy, what who was half of her age and absolutely loaded to the gills with money. So you've got your ex-husband paying some small bills, you got your current husband showing up with bags of cash, and you got your boyfriend, who is half of your age, and a member of the English aristocracy, all vying to fund your dream project. What an absolute queen. But Nikki also didn't want to depend solely on the dudes in her life. And she had a history of translating her work into commercially available products. The most famous being when in the 1960s she produced a series of inflatable nanas to use as pool toys, and everyone was scandalized because artists don't do that. Of this endeavor, Nikki said, quote, whether or not people think it's arts or whether or not it is art doesn't matter to me, end quote. And when asked why she felt the need to make her work commercially available in this way, she simply responded, quote, to become a millionaire. And she was serious because monumental sculptures don't come cheap. In order to finance the tarot garden in particular, Nikki came up with a new venture. In 1982, so within the first, you know, four or five years of the project, she designed a perfume, which became something of a collector's item. The bottle in and of itself is a work of art. It's made of the most beautiful blue glass with a gold cap, and then there's basically a mini sculpture on top of that cap of two intertwining snakes, which is a motif that appeared pretty frequently in Nicky Day Sunfall's work. As for the perfume inside of the bottle, one blogger describes it as, quote, sour, green, fruity, and intense, an equivalent between a lime, a peach, and rattlesnake venom. End quote. Ultimately, profits from the perfume would go on to account for one-third of the tarot garden's construction, which ultimately cost about $5 million in late 20th century money. Today it'd probably be quite a bit more. While Nicki de Saint-Fall did manage to find income sources, other obstacles proved much more difficult. In addition to her failing health, Nikki underwent a series of heartbreaks in the late 80s and early 90s. The first of these was in 1989, when her longtime assistant and friend Ricardo Menon died of AIDS. This loss was particularly devastating for Nikki. She fell into a deep depression afterwards, but part of her grieving process was the fact that she made Ricardo's gravestone, which takes the form of a cat. It's delightful for being a gravestone. And you can still see that cat today at Paris' Montparnasse Cemetery where Ricardo is buried. There is also another cat sculpture at the Tarot Garden with Ricardo's name on it, as a very fitting memorial to someone who was a critical individual in Nicki's life and work. To put it very simply, he was her family. In 1991, just two years after Ricardo passed away, Nikki's husband and greatest collaborator, Jean Tong Li, died of heart failure at the age of 66, which sent Nikki obviously into an even greater depression. And on top of all of that, she also lost a series of other collaborators and friends, many of them to AIDS, leading her to become or reinforcing her role as a great advocate with regards to the AIDS epidemic. But nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stand in the way of Nikki Desan Fall completing the Tarot Garden, even if she did it remotely. As the project progressed, Nikki did spend less time on site. The people there knew what they were doing. They were in close contact with her, usually by telephone or fax, because, you know, 1990s, and they were carrying out her plans. She just happened not to be there. She would, of course, still visit, and every time she visited, she would always stay in the Empress with her jacuzzi. But for the most part, she was elsewhere. Now, lest anyone be like she wasn't on site for her own dream project, what? She was off making other works and trying to navigate the very red tape of Italian bureaucracy in trying to get the park to be a public space. One of the final things that Nicky de Sanfal had to do before the garden could open was to make an entryway, which she commissioned from friend and architect Mario Botta. The entry was deliberately made to be a contrast to the garden itself. It is no-nonsense brick with a single circular opening at its center. Nikki de Sanfal wrote the following about her reason for choosing something so different to demarcate the space between the outside world and the realm that she spent 20 plus years constructing. Quote, I asked my friend Mario Botta to make an entrance of the garden in contrast to what was inside. Mario made a masculine fortress-like wall of local stones, which marks clearly the separation of the world without and the world within. The wall symbolizes for me a protection like the dragon who protects the treasure in fairy tales. So the wall is the dragon, the sculptures are the treasure. On May 15th, 1998, the Tarot Garden officially opened to the public. Work, however, was not officially done. While living in California, where Nikki de Sunfal left behind a considerable material legacy, her works are all over California, Nikki was planning to add a maze to the tarot garden, which would have been the coolest. You might even say it was amazing. I'm so sorry. Ground was broken to build the maze, and there was a little bit of work done to get the project started. Unfortunately, Nikki de Sansfal died in a Californian hospital in 2002 at what I consider to be the very young age of 71, the cause of death being pulmonary failure. She was not alone on her deathbed. Instead, she was surrounded by her first husband, Harry Matthews, and her two now adult children. While some people might find sort of dark poetic irony in the fact that Nikki de Saint Faul died surrounded by the family she sacrificed in order to pursue the art that essentially slowly poisoned her over the years, the reality was of course much more complicated. Because even though the chemicals that Nikki de Saint-Fal interacted with in her work eventually killed her, the making of those works are what saved her life. And for someone who had such an epically terrible childhood and profound struggles with her mental health, that's kind of miraculous. In accordance with her wishes, all construction on the tarot garden stopped when Nicky desanfal died. It's as if the garden was an extension of her person, of her body, of her spirit. One that could not grow and change without the instrument to which it was attached. And in many ways, that's exactly what the tarot garden was to Nikki desanfal. It was her soul laid bare, rendered in welded metal, cement, and glittering fragments of glass and mirror. A place to honor the things that she held holy. A place to dream and to hope and to reflect. A place to find healing. Although all work on the Tarot Garden stopped upon Nikki de Sunfall's death in 2002, the space has not stopped bringing joy to hundreds of thousands of people. And that was what Nikki wanted from this space. As Nikki De Sunfall once said herself, quote, I felt my new message was to give joy. I feel that what I'm supposed to do is bring joy into people's hearts. And if people tell me that they've had five minutes of joy looking at my art, it makes me feel good. And it makes me feel like my art is worthwhile. End quote. Today, the Tarot Garden receives on average 75,000 visitors a year. In addition to art enthusiasts, the garden is a huge hit with children. They climb all over everything like it's some kind of playground, which it kind of is. It's also very dog friendly, which is delightful. I visited the garden in late April 2021, and I can safely say that I have never seen anything remotely like it. Nor do I ever expect to see anything like it again. I was lucky enough to go with friends, um, one of whom often says, I want to see magic, which is a phrase that I've since appropriated for myself. And what that means is that we want to see things and places that make us feel more alive. We want to see things that make us feel more connected. We want to see things that make us more inspired. It's safe to say that we found magic that day at Nicki Daysan Falls Tarot Garden. It's a day and a place that we will never forget. And all of us look forward to going back and finding that magic all over again one day very soon. That is all I have for you on Nikki Daisan Fall and the Tarot Garden. I hope that you enjoyed this episode, of course I do, and that you will head over to the podcast website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com, to see a bunch of images and where you can find sources related to today's episode. I would highly recommend reading a 2016 essay by Ariel Levy that appeared in The New Yorker, which is entitled Beautiful Monsters: Art and Obsession in Tuscany. Also, if you can get your hands on it, I don't know how easy that will be, but there is a short book that Nikki de Sainte Fall wrote about the Tarot Garden, which is helpfully titled The Tarot Garden. Much of that content can be found on the website for the Tarot Garden, as well as the website of the Nikki de Saint-Fall Charitable Trust. And of course, I will post all of those links and more on the podcast's website. Stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. As for Gus Corner, Gus just turned eight years old. He turned eight years old. He's a little old man. He turned eight years old on April 22nd. Um, he is currently enjoying a very hot Wisconsin summer with my parents, helping them around the yard. Uh, and we discovered recently that he does not like it when my mom sucks the helium out of birthday balloons and talks like a chipmunk. For the record, we do not get birthday balloons for our dog, although I think that maybe we should. These were unrelated birthday balloons. I am assured that he is happy and healthy and probably getting too many treats. As for me, I have seven weeks left in Rome. We'll see if I can get another podcast episode out. I hope so. Especially because I have someone in mind who said that they were willing to be a guest. It'd be my first guest. I have no idea what I'm doing, but she's very patient and lovely. And I'm hoping I can get her on as a guest, which would be very exciting. So we'll see. If you have enjoyed the podcast, I would greatly appreciate it once again if you would leave it a review or even just a star rating on iTunes or, you know, wherever you listen. That would absolutely make my day. The usual thank yous go out to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the royalty-free music that you hear in all of the podcast episodes. The first song, you know, the classical tune, is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod, and the Jantier tune is called Success Dreams, which, hey, that's fitting. That is all from me. But as always, I hope that you take just a little bit of time, maybe a lot of time, but hopefully even just a little bit, to go find something that makes you happy. Go look at something beautiful today, go find your joy. Alright, over and out. A la prossima amici.