Tuesday, December 1, 2009

James Castle, Part 1


After being sternly warned by a security guard that “Absolutely no photography is allowed in this exhibit,” I continued to photograph the drawings. Since there was only one guard in the exhibit, it was a simple caper. I just kept tabs on his rounds through the different rooms. To avoid drawing attention to myself, I would pretend to scribble something down in my notebook while I traced the course of his footsteps by ear. During one round, as the guard was about to exit the room, I overheard a young man dismiss one of the drawings, “This isn't art.” To the credit of a young woman he was with, she quickly responded, “Of course it is!” Their conversation ended there and I snapped a photo of a barnyard drawn in soot.



Garden Valley House with Outside Staircase

Soot-and-spit drawing, with stick applied lines and wiped soot wash on gray cardboard faced with cream paper (from Rinso box); punched, stretched and tied around edge with white string.



I tend to agree with the young woman, but with a slight variation on her response: “Of course it can be!” In fact, most anything can be art: a tattered shoe lace in the gutter; the rhythm of the surf on a beach; a mathematic fractal calculated and spit out by a computer. When we call something “art,” we are not simply identifying it as one of a particular class of objects, or one of a certain sort of actions. We call that thing “art” because we are having a relationship with it—an active relationship (albeit, of a very particular sort). So when the girl exclaimed, “Of course it is art!” she was affirming that she was having this sort of relationship with the drawing. And when the boy murmured , “This isn't art,” he was merely pointing out, with bitterness, that he was not. The abruptness of their conversation made me wonder if not another sort of relationship had just been denied.



I have a hunch that this response, “this isn't art,” (and the denied relationship it most clearly implies) is not an uncommon response to James Castle's drawings and cardboard objects. After all, this temporary exhibit was relatively quiet on both free Thursday nights I've visited while the rest of the museum buzzed with visitors. But perhaps most museum-goers would not question or be interested in whether or not Castle's objects are art. Instead, their lack of enthusiasm could be the result of their answering—in the negative—a much more sophisticated and interesting question of James Castle's work: “Is it good art?” That question is deceptively simple, however, so to begin to answer it for myself, I'll pose a related question that requires a little more work: “In what ways does it fail and in what ways does it succeed if we engage it as art?”





Farmscape with houses, Totems and "Tumbleweed" Bushes

Soot-and-spit drawing, with stick applied lines and wiped soot wash on cream paper.




An introduction to James Castle is in order, but you're not going to get it from me. I'm lazy. So rather than paraphrase an already concise one, I'll just reproduce a section of the introduction on the Art Institute's website [1]:


An artist who has received growing attention over the past few decades for producing a remarkable body of work without undergoing formal training, James Castle is especially admired for the unique handmade quality, graphic skill, and visual and conceptual range that characterizes his art...

Castle, an Idaho native who was by all accounts deaf since birth, drew over and over again the living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, barns, sheds, and chicken houses that were rooted in his rural surroundings. His favorite medium was a combination of wood-burning-stove soot and saliva. Because he used found papers, not commercially produced ones, and homemade rather than professional artists’ materials, his works have a singular, immediate, and natural quality—a sort of passionate commitment particular to his art—that complements perfectly the skill and acuteness with which he manipulated his materials.

Castle did not learn to lip-read, fingerspell, or sign but instead seemed to have turned his obsessive and constant production of drawn images into his primary mode of communication. Lacking the tools of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, Castle structured his own sense of place through the precise architectural and spatial references of his familiar surroundings. He also drew upon a broad assortment of sources for inspiration, including magazines, books, catalogues, advertisements, commercial packaging, newspapers, and cartoons, as well as from the deep resources of his constantly investigatory and analytical mind.

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