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Touched into Being - James Castle

Art in America, June, 2001 by Stephen Westfall

Born a deaf mute in rural Idaho in 1899, James Castle used drawing in place of language to record and animate the world around him. Two recent exhibitions in New York offered an extensive look at this little-known, self-taught artist, whose work, the author argues, transcends the limitations of so-called Outsider art.

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Drawing was James Castle's speech; in the tactile and vernacular sense, his language. Born a deaf mute, Castle (1900-1977) lived out his life on his family's two farms in rural Idaho, first in Garden Valley and then in nearby Treasure Valley. For reasons not fully understood, he refused to learn to read and write. After a misguided effort to suppress his incessant drawing so that he might learn language skills, his parents wisely encouraged his interest in drawing, which he pursued almost obsessively for the rest of his life. His images range in style from a knotty, perspectivally inventive architectural realism to an imaginative or dreamlike representation in which houses and mailbags become living creatures, and further on to diagrammatic and .symbolic grid systems that mimic calendars, comic strips and the notational orderings of inventories. Through his peculiar mediums of homemade inks (made from soot, saliva and, occasionally, ground-up colored paper), string and found papers, Castle undertook a lifelong project of describing--I would say touching--his world into animate being. Until recently, his drawings were hardly known beyond the world of Outsider art fairs and magazines, and a few regional art museums, but in the past year three shows mounted in New York City have awakened the broader art public to a body of work of extraordinary intensity and nearly unclassifiable beauty.

Last spring two shows ran more or less concurrently. "House Drawings," at the Drawing Room, the annex gallery of the Drawing Center in SoHo, was devoted to Castle's renderings of the interiors and grounds of his family's farm. (There was added poignancy to this show due to the death of its curator, Jay Tobler, from leukemia at the age of 33, just seven days before it opened.) Meanwhile, the American Institute of Graphic Arts presented "Reputedly Illiterate: The Art Books of James Castle," an exhibition of 80 of Castle's hand-sewn books, curated by Tom Trusky. "House Drawings," in particular, was the breakthrough show. The exhibition was across the street from the Drawing Center's larger gallery, where holdings from the Prinzhorn collection of Outsider art had been assembled into a show ("The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wunderbloc") that couldn't help but cast a contextualizing shadow over Castle's work. Nevertheless, reverential reviews confirmed that Castle had been discovered by the mainstream art world, and in December Knoedler Gallery mounted the widest-ranging survey of Castle's works, "The Common Place," accompanied by a substantial catalogue with an essay by the poet and critic John Yau.(1)

A poet's sympathy is required in assessing Castle, because he is sealed off from a traditional historical reading. Castle was deemed "uneducable" by the school for the deaf he attended, and he was sent home after one year. In a recent article in Folk Art, Trusky points out that the school's action may have had less to do with any inherent unwillingness on Castle's part than with then-prevailing attitudes about those born deaf and mute. (People who became deaf through illness or an accident, such as his sister Nellie, were at the time considered more reachable).(2) Still, his refusal to learn to read, write and sign may well have been an expression of defiance from a sensitive boy in an awful predicament, reacting to rejection from school. For the rest of his life, Castle remained ostensibly illiterate, yet a number of his collages engage in wordplay, employing words as signs and punning objects. And his hand-sewn books evince an apparent fascination with books as constructed objects. In any event, his home appears to have been an extraordinarily fertile environment for Castle's love of materials, textures, demarcated spaces and the image of the printed word. His parents were also the local postmasters and ran a general store. There were mailbags leaning against walls in the living room; plenty of tags, labels, envelopes, glue, string and twine to get involved with; and a general social bustle unusual for a rural household. Born into a family of seven children, Castle seems to have been loved, accepted and given the run of the place to map out in his drawings.

Castle's drawings are usually small, many no bigger than the back flap of a letter envelope. But they contain worlds. The works are usually not dated, so it is difficult to track Castle's development as an artist, but somewhere along the line he learned perspective. Yau suspects he might have learned it from a pictorial guide, perhaps given to him by his parents, and points out that Castle's apparent inability to read only heightens our appreciation of the native intelligence he would have brought to bear on studying the pictures and applying them to his own surroundings. His perspectival renderings are his most initially compelling works, and they may also be the most deeply satisfying. Castle's line is fluid, but dogged rather than quick. He smoothed and smudged both his line and the planar pools of shadow that form hills and banks of trees. The buildings are rendered on paper in lines that denote hammered planks of wood. The papers he worked on are mostly found scraps, already toned (one striking farm scene shown at Knoedler is on faded twilight-blue paper) and in many cases bearing the accidental textures and wear of prior use. The buildings and fences are set against the dark masses of trees and hills; sometimes the lighter forms just break the horizon line, and the tonal sensitivity, of the passages from framing dark to figuring light are worthy of Morandi.

Touched into Being - James Castle

Art in America, June, 2001 by Stephen Westfall

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