James Castle retrospective at Art Museum

There’s an interesting point in this retrospective when the simple urge to reproduce what the eye sees gives way to a deeper urge to express what the spirit feels. A series of somber, nicely rendered depictions of Idaho farmland suddenly undergoes a transformation. Mysterious “plank totems” and phallic-looking out-of-proportion trees sprout and proliferate. The everyday becomes mysterious, and reportage gives way to myth making. Art is born.

James Castle would seem an unlikely candidate for immortality. Born profoundly deaf, he was sent to a state school but refused to learn to speak, or to read. He cocooned himself in a world of silence, and something marvelous occurred. Rather than remaining uncommunicative, he reached out with his eyes, and trained his hands to reproduce what they saw. Thus his early landscapes and interiors were born.

A certain obsessive quality marks Castle’s work— not only in a visual sense, but it also carries over into his work method. He would use any materials that came to hand: scraps of cardboard cartons, discarded cigarette packs, pages of the textbooks that he wouldn’t read. Sometimes he would combine them to create dimensional works: in figures of animals and people, household objects, the interiors of houses, even in a series of “doorway” pieces. He took photographs and laboriously copied them— his Self-Portrait is copied from a photograph taken of Castle as a child. In copying the anonymous photograph, he makes it his own. He created entire “photograph albums” of playing-card-sized images of people, places and things.

Because Castle’s solutions to the urge to create are so elementary, they take on an aura of inevitability. Castle had to either create or implode, so he grabbed at anything that came to hand. He had to “decode” the world around him, and his explanations sometimes became fantastic—people with wheels for feet (perhaps they moved very quickly)— and inspired stranger fantasies, like two pig-headed children. Were they literally “pig-headed”? Or fat? Or did they enjoy making fun of a man who could neither hear nor speak? How can we know? Such questions are subsumed into the mystery of James Castle’s created cosmos.

Near the rear of the exhibition stands a glass case containing Castle’s working materials, which were preserved by his family. The extreme simplicity of these “tools” surprised me, even bearing in mind the fact that Castle was a self-taught artist who “made art” because it was literally the only way he could communicate with others. When you look at these popsicle sticks, crayons, wads of cotton, nails and nutshells, Castle’s story becomes every bit as moving as Helen Keller’s. This is what the sometimes-overused phrase “the triumph of the human spirit” is all about.