JAMES CASTLE IN ARTFORUM

JAMES CASTLE IN ARTFORUM

One of my landlords is an established artist (as opposed to “emerging” ones like me) and hugely knowledgeable about the contemporary art scene. He bequeathed me a number of thick, slick Artforum magazines, and I’ve just recently begun to read bits and pieces of them. Tonight, unable to sleep, I read about James Castle’s retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009.

James Castle was born deaf in 1899 in the Boise region of Idaho. He was illiterate, and never learned to speak, read lips or sign. He was, however a prolific producer of art.

Reviewing the exhibition, Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, had this to say about his oeuvre: “…(it) includes intimate tonal drawings of the farmland and the homestead where he grew up; sculptures of human figures, animals, and objects made by stitching together pieces of paper and cardboard; hand-sewn books containing alphabets, syllabaries, calendrical schemes, and other data laid out in grids; and myriad copies, on fragments of used paper, of texts and images culled from illustrated magazines and commercial packaging.”

Like the other articles I’ve read in Artforum, the scholarship is awesome, the language is high-tone, and words are bandied about that I don’t know the meaning of. I concluded my reading without being at all clear what the author is trying to say. I’m left only with a deep feeling of kinship with Castle’s work.

He makes tonal drawings that blur the distinction between drawing and painting, using charcoal and spit. These works have a dark sepia tone, and are both dreamlike and a bit melancholy. The headline picture shows a group of people, all dressed alike, perhaps children, standing in a row, the tallest grading to the shortest. Slightly apart stand a couple who are dressed differently. The faces are rectangular and surrounded by a neat, reverse-u border of hair. While this image is schematic, he also draws architectural scenes like porches that are deeply satisfying in composition and in the loose but convincing use of perspective.

His sculptures/objects are full of the pleasure of found materials ingeniously cobbled together with twine. A crib has rectangular wheels, just as the faces in drawings are rectangular. His books have a grid layout which orders and beautifies the distressed paper , collage-like, that make up the pages. The gentle geometry mixed with the ecstatically understood (“seen”)makeshift materials that could be any scrap of paper others would burn or discard is very close to my heart. One figure made from cardboard boxes fitted with a green dress of printed paper looked exactly like something I have been dreaming of constructing myself.