Before its notoriety as the site of tragic riots, the Watts area of Los Angeles was more mildly famous for an architectural oddity, a trio of 100-ft.-tall latticework spires called the Watts Towers. Inlaid with 75,000 sea shells and countless bits of crockery, the tow ers were the lifetime hobby of an immigrant Italian tilesetter named Simon Rodia, who built them by hand in his backyard (TIME, Sept. 3, 1951). Since 1963 the Towers have been designated by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board as a historic monument, and, in the eyes of younger West Coast artists, they have become a shrine. "No existing church stood for so much to us," says Walter Hopps, director of the Pasadena Art Museum. In fact, he was married there.

The Towers exemplify what Hopps calls California's "crazy tradition for assemblage and the object." And, as such, they set the keynote for the freshest of West Coast art, which is the newest rage on the U.S. gallery scene (see color pages). Less than five years ago, the closest thing to an art movement that California could boast was a group of San Francisco-centered figurative painters, such as Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, who softly focused abstract expressionism on the human figure. Now, whether one considers it a good thing or bad, the West Coast is truly vying with New York insofar as a freshness in art is concerned.

Embalmed Stage Sets. For the newer California artists the words object, assemblage and crazy seem quite fitting. According to Los Angeles County Museum Curator of Modern Art Maurice Tuchman, their emphasis on detail, however offbeat, is "a profound reaction against California as a land of lotus eaters, neon lighting and drugstore starlets." Their attainment of maturity is not at all guaranteed, but they have made craftsmanship, if not neatness of execution, a competitive goal. "They are always looking over each other's welding seams," says Hopps. "They will applaud a Paul Harris (see opposite) but criticize his stitches."

For Paul Harris, 40, his upholstered people with their flagrant colors and featureless patterns are really subconscious cartooning. And he endows it with a kind of mordant humor that is much admired by most young West Coast artists. "If you see a bird flying," he says, "it has all the qualities of being a beautiful bird. Then if you find a dead bird, it makes you wonder what is the real bird."

Rather than cartoons, Edward Kienholz, 38, goes in for whole stage sets (or "tableaux," as he calls them) that have the grisly impact of a charnel house, yet on second glance present deeply shocking morality plays. Birthday, says the well-spoken former farmer, should express the hope offered by even the most forlorn birth. Giant plastic arrows express resurrection, even if with a tainted blatancy; the plastic bubble above the mannequin mother's mouth, actually a dimestore baby's plastic bubble, symbolizes a scream. It is theater, embalmed in translucent epoxy and cluttered with props--a ghostly coat rack, old sandals, an overnight case. But it deals with harsh reality. Says Kienholz, "We need to say these things: I'm a man. I'm an artist. I make a good sculpture. It may not be art, but I know it's made well."

"Funky." Another believer in craftsmanship is William Wiley, 27, who takes time off from teaching a graduate seminar in painting and drawing at the University of California's Davis campus to question the reality of objects by subjecting them to the pummeling of abstraction. Like many contemporary artists, he no longer respects any border between painting and sculpture. "Why do some people think a painting is more important than a car, or vice versa?" he asks. "Some ask how I can spend my time making these crazy things--and those same people are out plugging away at their lawn and all wigged out because their trees are dying."

Edward Ruscha, 27, limns with the same T-square edge precision that is the trademark of hard-edged pop. But to him, "Andy Warhol's soup cans are too syrupy sweet." Ruscha prefers to paint what he calls "facts," words, corporate symbols or even filling stations, which he sees as machine monuments in the Western scenery, way stations in the wilderness. His compositions evoke a soaring into space just like a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the desert. The exaggerated imagery is commonplace, but the sense of dynamic movement is purely West Coast.

In a sense, the younger Californian artists show American art at its last frontier. They do not mind being "funky," that is, casual, deliberately corny, explorers of the American vernacular. In the ambiance of the gadget, the dragster with painted flames in its exhausts, the never-closed supermarket with motorized shopping cars, the West Coast artist has become his own deus ex machina. They are part-optimistic, part-spooky gardeners in a garish no man's land between art and reality. Like the man who built the Watts Towers, they might, when finished, just move away and never come back.

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