Touched into Being - James Castle

Art in America, June, 2001 by Stephen Westfall

It is tempting to group Castle's imagery by stylistic category: the perspectival "realism" of his landscapes and unpeopled interiors, the otherworldly or visionary aspects of his figures and the colored-pulp drawings, and the more gridded pattern structures that suggest a language rather than a pictorial impulse (I think of these drawings, books and collages as his Fluxus work for that reason). But the connective tissue between Castle's discernibly divergent directions is more complex. The labored evenness of surface in the perspectival landscapes initially disguises several totemic figures rising out of the ground. These are vertical planes of horizontally stacked planks of wood backed by a pole or beam planted in the ground. They first seem to be part of the farm's architectural spread, but, once you notice them, they appear to have no purpose, except as figural emissaries from Castle's imagination and, thus, abstract cousins of his "friends." And yet we are shown their fronts and backs in rotations consistent with the spatial layout of the rest of each scene. The quiet strangeness of these hammered planks is reminiscent of the strange bottles on trees that float among long-stemmed flowers accompanying some of Paula Modersohn-Becker's sitters in her late paintings.

And here we come to the paradoxes that illuminate Castle's work in a wavering, naphtha light. In his introduction to the wonderfully titled anthology Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets, W.H. Auden suggests that the work of a major poet continues to mature "until he dies, so that, if confronted by two poems of equal merit written by the same poet at different times, the reader can immediately say which was written first. In the case of a minor poet, on the other hand, however excellent the two poems may be, the reader cannot settle the chronology on the basis of the poems themselves."(3) The same principles that hold for Auden's minor poet also hold for both the petit maitre and the Outsider artist. Almost every Outsider artist, no matter how captivating, hits pretty much the same note over and over in his work.

Castle's work, on the other hand, launches into different formats and shows unmistakable traces of development, as the artist grew more at ease with his homemade materials and more playful with his imagistic "themes." What is so tantalizing is that no possibility of a chronology exists, because no dates were ever kept. Yet perspective and fluidity of line are skills that are developed over time. It is also reasonable to suppose that entire periods of Castle's life may have been given over to a particular branch of his imagery. While we may never learn exactly how Castle's art developed, the breadth of his pictorial imagination, its thematic complexity and the manner in which it is nourished by and furthers a developing technique, all combine in Castle's case to shatter the constrictive bonds of the Outsider artist category. At the same time, the circumstances of his isolation from the larger cultural community and the lack of dates by which we might read the progress of his work place it beyond the reach of the normal critical apparatus we use in considering an artist's historical significance. How could Castle know he was making art, when, for him, these processes were his sole means of registering and communicating perception and memory?