The Art of the Bottle Cap

Bottle-cap art, long a poor cousin to tramp art, quilting and other established folk crafts, is finally achieving a measure of collectable respectability. Though still a scavenger art whose modest aspirations, rough edges and obscure origins baffle the uninitiated, it is no longer strictly a sideshow inspiring only hard- core aficionados.

The anonymous figures that populated thrift-store shelves so abundantly in the early 1980s have made the jump to antique markets and even the odd corners of design-magazine photo spreads. More recently, the work of Iowa farmhands Clarence and Grace Woolsey has roiled the art and antique world, both in its prodigiousness and in the stunning price appreciation following its 1993 discovery.

Though not yet the stuff of coffee-table books, bottle caps have provided the basis for a quintessentially 20th Century folk art as creators ranging from the Woolseys to anonymous Scouts to Chicago's well-publicized Mr. Imagination have strung and pounded thousands of them into objects in which whimsy is fundamental, functionality optional and art accumulative. The objects, which include baskets, buildings, animals, chains and miniature furniture as well as figures, are strictly Machine Age, with their anatomy of bottle caps (patented in 1892) and clothes-hanger or other wire.

Produced in quantity and, with a few exceptions, anonymously, the most common figures are about a foot high, their wood-block bodies decorated with a grid of incised lines, and sometimes glitter. Their serrated bottle-cap limbs hold a candy dish or ashtray; another tray is nailed to the head. The eyes are thumb-tacks, the ears wire or plastic hoops. The mouth is missing and a nose ring completes the face.

Aesthetically, one of their legs is planted in the mass-production world of tchotchkes and kitsch objects, but the other is in the folk-art universe of hand- built, one-of-a-kind works by untrained, usually unknown, creators. While high-culture urges are absent and pretension would be laughable on the aesthetic cusp where they stand, these figures display a certain charm in their haphazard expressiveness.

Fundamentally silly, they are almost like 3-D projections of cartoon characters, and like some cartoons, some bottle-cap pieces have an edge, making them more like an R. Crumb character than Mickey Mouse. Case in point: figures outfitted with a beer or soda can that reveals genitalia when lifted.

These flasher figures represent a common genre--obvious gag items probably destined for bars or similar venues. Other figures reflect a more idiosyncratic exploration of the form. Thus one artist pasted a photo of Lucille Ball onto a figure's face and gave her a bass fiddle to play. Another fashioned bottle caps into a strand of sausages (or a jump rope, perhaps) for a heavily painted figure to hold. Figures occasionally turn up decked out in clothes, outfitted with a carved face or carved hands, or holding a variety of oddball objects (including a pregnant figure holding a sign reading, "I was brainwashed").

The trial-and-error process of adapting a basically conventional design to a builder's own purposes allows a personal touch to squeeze through the prosaic materials and often-uncertain craftsmanship: in the choice of materials and colors, in how a face is suggested, in how a figure is positioned and decorated. Since departures from the norm most richly reveal the maker's hand, the most primitive figures--the ones with the free-est-form bodies, the wildest mixtures of bottle-cap colors and the most loosely suggested faces--can be especially intriguing. This sets bottle-cap work apart from, say, tramp art, where intricacy and high levels of craftsmanship typically define quality.

Still, there is something of tramp art's accumulative spirit in the striking textures of massed and strung bottle caps, especially in baskets, which reflect a similar mix of decorative and utilitarian impulses. These abstractions of twisting bottle-cap strands, which range from small candle holders to umbrella stands, are a good deal rarer than the figures and tend to display a more ambitious play of form and greater design variation.

They also appear to be older than the figures, which can be reasonably dated mostly to the '50s and '60s. The patina of the baskets and the designs of the caps would seem to put them further back in the century, making them a kind of funky successor to tramp art. Dating bottle-cap art is necessarily imprecise, though. Like tramp art, it is shrouded in anonymity, and it has been the subject of almost no published research.

Occasionally a figure has at least a semi-identifiable origin. One, with the tapered body that is a common alternative to the incised block, is signed "Scouts La Grange Park" and dated 1961. Another three figures of the same design bear stickers showing a likely pre-60s vintage (they give a postal zone) and a Brighton Park, Chicago, address. The Chicago-area locations are no fluke, since the Midwest seems to be the most common source for figures.

A '60s-or-later origin is apparent for a number of pieces because the bottle caps are imprinted with zip codes or lined with plastic rather than cork, both early-60s innovations. The flasher figures' origins are easiest to guess: They are fairly recent and likely to be commercial. One, for example, is stamped with the post office box of a Can Man Co. in St. Louis, while a male and female pair found in Florida are new enough to sport Diet Pepsi's "Uh Huh" slogan on their bodies.

As for the bowl-holding figures, from a dollar or two just a few years ago even the most common ones now commonly now fetch $25 and up, whether sold as folk art or '50s kitsch. Bargains can sometimes be found when more unusual figures are priced in that range, with very tall figures, carved faces, exuberant decoration, animal figures or figures holding something other than bowls among the work to look for. The older a piece is and the more it departs from the norm, the more it is likely to be worth a premium, of course. Prices of $150, $200 or more are not unheard-of for especially odd pieces. But at that price buyers should be certain they have a clear understanding of just what constitutes idiosyncratic.

Whatever the value of the work, the notion of bunches of ordinary people toiling away anonymously to produce these absurdist little figures has its appeal, even if it remains a mystery just who was the original artist who decided it made such good sense to string bottle caps on coat hangers, stick them into blocks of wood, put nose rings and earrings on them and have them hold candy dishes or ashtrays.