Vista de sala de la exposición. James Castle. Mostrar y almacenar, 2011

James Castle

Show and store

jueves 02 junio 2011
3:22
Painting
Experimentation

This conversation with Lynne Cooke, exhibition curator and subdirector of the Museo Reina Sofía, focuses on the exhibition, James Castle. Show and Store, held between 18 May and 5 September 2011. Cooke discusses different points about this painter, draughtsman, sculptor and independent editor, who was cut off from the usual circles of commerce, speculation and exhibition and whose work makes it possible to consider other modes of artistic production.


His work denotes a delicate everydayness, inseparable from its condition as a personal archive of sights and memories. Its personal and sincere commitment, in short, allows for a kind of hopefulness in the art, although successive exhibitions of James Castle’s work have decontextualised it to present it in displays or tried to categorise it in unrelated art categories and contexts. The conversation discusses some of the artist’s biographical details and considers what brings us to look at his work today. One of Castle’s distinguishing traits was his lack of hearing, an insignificant virtue in a history of art dominated by vision. For this reason, the sounds of the materials used in his works – paper, cardboard and charcoal – have been included. However, these works do not need this dimension to be understood.

Production

José Luis Espejo

Locution

Vanessa Alonso

License
Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0

James Castle

Show and store

James Castle, Show and Store. 18 May to 5 September 2011

Lynne Cooke, curator: James Castle is an American artist who lived from 1899 to 1977. He lived in quite a remote part of the United States. He spent his whole life drawing, working on his art. He was born deaf and he didn’t speak so he didn’t have a job. What he really loved to do was to draw and make constructions and books. And his family regarded this as his vocation, but they were not people who had a strong interest in art and they didn’t look at this work necessarily as art. So it’s a very big challenge to think of a way of presenting it to the public. But from that time onwards it’s been very highly and well received.

Contemporary artists like Terry Winters or Maurizio Cattelan and many others have immediately gravitated to it as work of high interest and I think it’s therefore interesting to bring it to Spain or to bring it to Europe, in fact. And to consider why we might be looking at it now or what it can show us. I think I would not categorise it as outsider art. He addressed questions in his practice about representation, about the nature of visual languages, about the relationship between text and image or between text as an image or text as script. He invented languages. He did many of the things that artists in the 60s and 70s have done.

And Castle has that kind of freedom to move between styles and ways of working, between sculptures made of found and stitched paper. That kind of range of work is typical of what we think of as a contemporary artist who moves between media and moves between subject matters as he or she comes to address a question. Self-taught artists or artists with histories of psychotic problems or questions of alienation tend to evolve or develop one style and to work very obsessively with that style. It’s something that’s almost like a brand. With Castle, you can’t be so sure.