I recently saw the trailer of a glorious Chinese movie which I obviously did not understand I single word of but I thought was visually spectacular. The entire movie was clad in gold and many of you will obviously know its name but I cannot recollect it at this point of time so we will move on. The point of course is that the designing on this piece of throne is very reminiscent of what I had seen on my television set. But the wonderful part is that neither is this part of Hollywood’s elaborate sets nor is it clad in real gold.
In 1950, a quiet janitor named James Hampton rented an unheated dump of a garage in Washington DC because he was “working on something” and needed a larger space than his room in a nearby boarding house. Every night after finishing his job, the small, soft-spoken man would work in the garage for five or six hours. Hampton believed that God visited him there regularly to guide him in his project, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. That’s what he states and what he likes to call this. While I would not want to discuss in detail the whole subject of whether God touched him or not, it still remains a wonderful piece of artistry created from nothing but mere garage art.
An ingenious selection and use of materials and an innate feeling for design characterize Hampton’s radiant work. His work has a signature touch of both the divine and the royal. They are crafted with skill and imagination that you would not expect an ordinary man without any formal training to normally posses. A poor man, he applied his imagination to the transformation of discarded materials. Merchants in the used-furniture district near the garage remember that Hampton would browse, inquire about prices, and sometimes return with a child’s wagon to carry away his purchases.
All of the objects are covered with different grades of gold and aluminum foils removed from store displays, bottles, cigarette boxes, and rolls of kitchen foil. Hampton paid neighborhood indigents for the foil on their wine bottles, and he walked the streets with a worn-out old sack in which to carry his finds. He also gathered used light bulbs, cardboard, insulation board, construction paper, desk blotters, and sheets of transparent plastic, probably from the trash of the government buildings where he worked. I vividly remember a certain poet once saying that there is nothing in this world that is ineligible to be the subject of his work. I suppose Hampton could be a creator from the same mold.
