Challenging work of a contented outsider

VISUAL ARTS:THE AMERICAN ARTIST James Castle, who died in 1977, was an outsider artist who devoted his life to the obsessive creation of an extraordinary body of work, comprising drawings, handmade books, cards and sculptural pieces.

What he made doesn’t conform to the reassuring, folksy stereotype of Grandma Moses, though. It’s much darker, and stranger and, viewed in the context of mainstream art of the 20th century, much more formally challenging and ingenious. A substantial show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery coincides with a retrospective in the United States that has attracted a great deal of interest and is currently showing at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Castle was born in Garden Valley, Idaho in 1899. The family had a ranch and ran a general store and post office. It’s generally accepted that James was deaf from birth, though it’s much less clear that he was also, as had for a time been presumed, mute and mentally challenged. More convincing is the view that he was autistic. He attended the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind for several years and was apparently regarded as difficult and un-socialised, never learning to read or write or, indeed to sign or lip-read. Still in his teens he retreated to the loft of the family’s ice house which was, effectively, his studio.

While he played no useful role in the family’s many day to day tasks, the images he made evidence a continual fascination with his home, its immediate surroundings, with people and animals, and items of clothing and other precisely observed inanimate objects. Fragments of printed lettering were a subject in themselves for him. Imagery from magazines and catalogues also provided subject matter, though to a lesser extent. Apart from two-dimensional images he made elaborate three-d constructions, many of an architectural nature. It is as though he retreated to his own private space and set about making a replica of the world around him in an almost Borgesian way.

It has plausibly been suggested that his art works, in the absence of other forms of communication, amounted to a sustained bid to relate to his surroundings, both to the immediate, familial and physical, and the wider sphere, and to situate himself within them, to impose a personal sense of order on a worryingly disordered prospect. One of the remarkable things about Castle is his apparent rejection of language, and one could argue that in its place he formulated his own visual language. Strikingly, he also rejected the conventional paraphernalia of artistic production. His family seem to have been exceptionally accommodating and helpful toward him, but he did not want pristine sheets of paper, pencils, paints and brushes.

Instead, for the most part, he used ash from the woodstove moistened and diluted with saliva, applied with pieces of stick or twigs. He worked on found scraps of paper, sheets from copybooks, various kinds of packaging, circulars or pages from old textbooks. All of which underlines something about the art world’s eventual appreciation of his work, which began at some stage in the 1950s, when a nephew initiated efforts to publicise and exhibit it.

Not only was there a growing interest in outsider art per se, but from early in the 20th century mainstream artists had systemically appropriated and incorporated features of art made outside the bounds of the fine art tradition. They variously looked to tribal art, to what was called primitive or innocent art, to the art of children and the mentally ill, not so much as alternatives as in the cause of reinvigorating tradition. So it’s reasonable to suggest that we look at Castle’s work in a different way than would a putative audience early in the 20th century. In fact, when the family moved to Boise Valley in 1924, they simply discarded an enormous body of work, attaching no monetary or personal value to it.

If at some stage Castle and the mainstream art world met half way, it has to be emphasised that he became exceptionally accomplished technically with his chosen means, stringently limited as they were.

His tonal studies of the homestead and its nearby landscape, for example, whether made from memory or direct observation, are tremendously skilled and atmospheric, and incidentally infused with a distinctly melancholy air. They’re not quite like anything else, but at the same time they’re relatively conventional and easy to read.

That’s not as true of Castle’s approach to figuration. People are rendered in terms of squared-off, blocky forms. At times he becomes intensely interested in the engineering of clothing in a roughhewn though incredibly detailed way, indicative perhaps of the autodidact’s dogged determination to work things out for himself come what may.

There is at times something about the figurative images that recalls children’s drawings, but that’s not to disparage or undercut either.

Castle’s studies of figures, as with his study of a coat, are really compelling.

After the enthusiastic reception accorded to his retrospective, it’s been suggested that he will in the long run be acknowledged as one of the finest American artists of the 20th century. That may be overstating things a bit. It also raises the question of whether the work of such a consummate and on the face of it contented outsider – he wasn’t waiting to be “discovered” – should be absorbed into the mechanisms of a system that is not just scholarly and disinterested but also commercial. In any case, it’s well worth your while making up your own mind about this exceptional artist.

Oddly apposite, Mike Nelson’s contribution to the ongoing ‘The Paradise’ series in the Douglas Hyde’s Gallery 2 is a new installation. Nelson’s work partly deals with travel, cultural displacement and notions of the exotic. Here, a group of worn oriental rugs lie adjacent to a roughly constructed wooden platform. Ascend the platform, though, and you come to a sprung trapdoor, which rather suggests a gallows, lending the paradisiacal patterning of the tattered rugs a distinctly ominous edge.

James Castle: Drawings and three-dimensional work. And, in Gallery 2: Mike Nelson, The Paradise (33). Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Until Jan 20