James Castle show -- a response

Despite my skepticism at an exhibition advertised as "Outsider Art, Inside [the PMA, no less...]," I am glad to see such a large institution recognizing a body of work so untraditional and idiosyncratic -- especially when it allows hordes of non-art addicts exposure to something left field from Cezanne. As usual, the museum did a good job of contextualizing Castle's life and work in a thorough, if predictable, presentation. The particular aesthetic affinity for 'structures,' as the wall text put it, was really fascinating to connect throughout Castle's work, from his soot-and-spit sketches of lock mechanisms and abstracted cardboard doors to reproduced and permutated letterforms later on. His string-and-cardboard birds were to me quite beautiful and his sketches of 'Book-head man," especially over the pages of a math primer, were really stunning both visually and for their psychological implications. That motif in particular made me think of Louise Bourgeois's Femme Maison, a woman with a house-head that she repeated in several drawings to gesture at domesticity subsuming the female mindset. Similarly the Castle drawings seem to reveal the artist's mental absorption into the printed book, whether premade or his own.
Castle's tendency towards manufacturing things with string and other materials lent itself to his obsession with the physical book form. The idea of what a book might mean to a deaf person, someone to whom language only has visual and semantic properties, is intriguing. The physical construction of the word is elevated, as evidenced in Castle's gridded calendars full of text and meticulous letter diagrams, where letterforms are drawn carefully over a field of continuous mechanical text, and sometimes warped, reversed or volumized. Castle even explored characters of languages beyond his own, which were no doubt to him foreign in both meaning and sound. This in itself reveals what a purely visual compulsion they held for him. In exploring language it is tremendously difficult to isolate one sensory or intellectual impact from another -- sound from sight, denotation from connotation -- but Castle was afforded an ironic rare view of language that was purely visual.