Art in America | October 2008
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Outsider's Private World on Screen
In recent years the work of James Castle (1899-1977), a deaf and mute self-taught artist living in nearly total isolation in rural Idaho, has been embraced by the art-world mainstream. Locally recognized as an artist by only a few at the time of his death, Castle created work that today is shown regularly in prestigious galleries across the country. And this month, “James Castle: A Retrospective,” his first museum survey featuring some 275 intimate drawings and constructions, opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art [Oct. 14, 2008-Jan. 4, 2009].
During the course of the show, organized by museum curator Ann Percy, screenings of a recent documentary, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist, by Jeffrey Wolf, will run continuously. In this briskly paced film, barely an hour long, Wolf, a first-time documentary director, approaches his complex subject with clarity, solid research and a refreshing lack of the sentimentality that too often mars documentaries on self-taught artists. In the process, perhaps ironically, the film goes a long way to blur the distinction between outsider and insider artist.
Tracing Castle’s life, the film examines his upbringing as the sixth of seven children in a family struggling to make ends meet in a rustic farm community near Garden Valley, Idaho. The documentary juxtaposes beautifully shot recent footage of the area with archival pictures of the countryside at the time of Castle’s youth, plus his later renderings of the environs. Adding to these evocative images, new age folk-inflected music written for the film by Jeff Beal helps convey the environment that proved to be infinitely fertile territory for Castle’s imagination.
Reminiscences and insightful commentary are provided by several of the artist’s nieces and nephews. The film covers Castle’s rejection of formal education, as he dropped out of a school for the hearing impaired and never learned to read or write. Instead, he retreated into a world of his own, over the years obsessively producing thousands of small drawings, collages and paper constructions, most often images that reflect the people, places and things of his immediate environment. In addition, he invented his own written language and an elaborate, codified visual vocabulary, the use and meaning of which only he knew. His technique was as eccentric as his vision. He shunned conventional art materials, favoring, instead, a paste he made of ash and saliva that he etched into the surfaces of found paper using pointed sticks. Helping to conjure the artist at work, Guy Wade, a nephew, recalls the great speed at which Castle drew; a niece, Gerry Garrow, mentions that he always smelled of soot.
While the family’s comments are absorbing, the strength of Wolf’s documentary lies in his judicious selection of art-world professionals to provide a strong case for Castle’s unique achievement. Art historians and curators Percy, Jerry Wilding and Sandy Harthorn are on hand, as well as dealers Frank Del Deo of New York’s Knoedler Gallery, John Ollman and Jacqueline Crist. Artists Terry Winters and Stephen Westfall discuss Castle’s work in general, and writer John Yau remarks on its internal logic. Robert Storr, of late ubiquitous in artist documentaries, discusses how Castle’s work resulted from a deep physiological impulse and attained a consistent balance of orderliness and play. Throughout the film, Castle’s luminous works appear to gently corroborate and elaborate upon the comments of the art-world talking heads.
—David Ebony
James Castle: Portrait of an Artist, directed by Jeffrey Wolf, 2008, 53 minutes, director of photography Anthony Jannelli, produced by the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists, distributed by Breakaway Films.