by Glenn Adamson
Imagine that you are back in your childhood home, just as it was when you were young. All the pieces of furniture you remember are in their place. The table is set for dinner; the fireplace is lit. The only thing missing is you, but that doesn’t matter—for your own experiences come back to you now, in all their original vividness. This is what happened for Alison Castle a few years ago, when she tracked down an article in House Beautiful from 1973. “Designing Their Own Lifestyle,” runs the title, and it fairly bursts off the page, with nine color images of the home in Scottsville, New York, where she grew up — the home that her parents Wendell Castle and Nancy Jurs created together.
Needless to say, this was not just any domestic interior. For young Alison, of course, it seemed completely normal to live in such an artistic environment; but only gradually, and in retrospect, would its significance become clear. Castle was the preeminent figure in the American art furniture movement, while Jurs is a prominent potter and ceramic sculptor. Add to this their wide circle of acquaintance with other craft artists like Roy Cartwright, Tommy Simpson, and Ann Sutton—whose works they did not so much strategically collect as companionably gather—and their home was unquestionably one of the most significant American interiors of its era. Its appearance was not well documented in the early ‘70s, however, and, as might be expected of two prolific artists, their environment was ever evolving. New creations from the studio constantly arrived while others achieved escape velocity. The upshot was that, until Alison found that magazine, all she had of the space in those days was a few family photos and her own memories. To encounter the pictures in House Beautiful was like stepping back into that dream.
Wendell Castle: Living is an attempt to capture this imaginative time travel. Alison has served as the curator for the project, and her recollections have given it shape. The gallery is divided into a sitting area, kitchen and dining areas, office/entryway, and bedroom enlivened with personal touches: Wendell’s guitar and some of his folk songbooks; a butcher block with Nancy’s name carved into it; and Alison’s own childhood highchair, an emblem of the past still present. Yet the exhibition is far from being only a private concern. It expands our view of Castle and his creative context in several important respects.
First, and most obviously, presenting these historic objects in a quasi-domestic setting usefully dispels their mantle of authority. These days, Castle’s sculptural furniture is invariably shown in splendid isolation—on gallery and museum platforms, under perfect lighting, with explanatory labels attesting to its importance. He deserves all the attention, of course, but as with any canonical artist, it can be difficult to see the work afresh. This exhibition gets us back to the heart of the matter, in every sense of that phrase. It reconnects us with the wondrous strangeness Castle’s work had when it was new, while also metaphorically taking him off his pedestal, putting him back among his loved ones.
This effect pervades the present exhibition, extending from several works that are pictured in the House Beautiful article–which remain in the family’s collection—to other key pieces of the 1960s and 70s, and a selection of later works that indicate Castle’s forward trajectory. This latter part of the exhibition traces Castle’s complex trajectory over the succeeding decades, including his magisterial neo-expressionist Dr. Caligari series, and ultimately bringing us to the masterworks of his late career. It is a story of continual reinvention, but also continuity. We see how his sinuous and massive forms, achieved using his innovative techniques of stack lamination and injection molding, served as an all-purpose vocabulary.
Castle loved nothing more than posing himself a compositional problem and solving it, and that deep satisfaction is felt throughout the show. The emphasis on everyday use, however, gives us something else to think about. We might focus a little less on the formal ingenuity of his designs, a little more on their emotive qualities: all those curves gently hugging the space; the warmth of the wood and the brightness of the plastic; what they might have meant to a child, who could not have known how unconventional they were.
Jurs’ ceramics, too, played an important role in this interior landscape. She would later become known for her imposing figural sculptures, often armored, expressing a powerful sense of female emergence. In the 1960s and ‘70s, however, she was mainly concentrating on raku-fired functional pottery, in line with her training at the School for American Craftsmen in Rochester. (Jurs met Castle in 1962, when he began teaching there, and graduated with a BFA in 1963.) In House Beautiful we see her pieces in action: blooming bowls and twisting goblets on the dining table, a commanding vessel standing on one of Castle’s molded plastic shelves, with its storm of black scorch drifting down into whiteness.
This conversation across mediums animated not only the house in Scottsville, but the whole of the craft movement of which Castle and Jurs were a part. Notwithstanding their eventual departures from this context—Jurs’ explorations of monumental sculpture, Castle’s crucial role in defining the 21st-century design avant garde—the craft movement was a huge presence in their artistic, professional, and social lives. And in 1973 it was at its height. The expressive possibilities of furniture, ceramics and other media were being explored like never before, especially on campuses like the one at Rochester, where faculty and students could pursue their own individual artistic inclinations rather than serving a commercial market. Meanwhile, the craft ethic was playing an important practical role in the unfolding counterculture, providing a means to escape the imperatives of consumerism.
Castle and Jurs were not really hippies—they were too focused on their careers and their family for that. Nor, however, were they squares. This is quite clear in the House Beautiful article: Castle wears a flowery shirt and blue jeans, the floors are decked out with kilims, and a psychedelic note is struck by a ribbed plastic tube jokingly connecting two clay pots to look like a vacuum cleaner. The editorial slant also clearly emphasizes Castle and Jurs’ independent lifestyle, noting that “they made or designed practically everything in this house themselves.”
House Beautiful was only one of many mass-market publications to promote such ideals. A few years previously, for example, Castle had been featured in a 1966 LIFE Magazine feature called “The Old Crafts Find New Hands,” alongside other luminaries of the movement like Harvey Littleton, Lenore Tawney, and Peter Voulkos. Paging through these old issues today, it’s possible to reconstruct the impression these unusual features have made—just compare the conventional, all-floral interior on the House Beautiful cover to the images of Castle and Jurs’ home within. But at this time, as editors well knew, an enthusiasm for handcraft was widespread and they were eager to bring those stories to a wide readership. There was a gentle revolution in the making.
Castle, of course, had been one of the prime protagonists of that movement. In his compound forms—chairs that merged with tables, functional forms that sprouted sculptural lighting, masses that engaged the wall or floor—he rethought furniture quite literally from the ground up, transforming the domestic interior into a space for experimentation. The 1972 Environment included here is a perfect example. The low-slung, curvaceous composition is organized around two horizontal surfaces, usable as a bed and a table, but also implying a more open-ended improvisatory situation. Two of the three torqued legs rise above the platform, one culminating in another small table, the other in a round light.
The total conception of this work is akin to Castle’s Environment for Contemplation (1970), which he created for a meditation-themed exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. (Alison remembers that extraordinary creation being in the house while she was growing up: “I would often sit inside with the door closed, playing in the light coming from the small opening at the top. It felt like being in a spaceship or a submarine.”) In the 1972 Environment, the womb-like enclosure of the earlier work has, as it were, been unfolded and laid out flat. The basic premise, though, is the same. This is not so much a defined object as a place of possibility, right in tune with the 1972 children’s song, “Free to Be… You And Me.”
Something similar can be said for Castle’s experiments in molded plastic — among the first such designs to be realized in America. He was initially inspired by developments in Italy, where the new technology had been in use for some time; the house had, among its few purchased pieces of furniture, a shelving unit by the Milan-based company Kartell, one of the leading manufacturers in this new field. Alison believes these came through George Beylerian, a retailer for Kartell in the US, who also sold Castle’s own designs in molded fiberglass. These began with his first Molar Chair and the neon-lit Benny Lamp, in 1969, and he then went on to develop a whole series of Molar furniture, including several other seating forms, tables, and wall shelves.
The Scottsville residence was furnished with quite a few of these pieces — House Beautiful described “a bright scene of undulating plastic furniture” — and they brought a fantastical pop sensibility to the house. Entering the front door, one imagines, may have felt a little like stepping into a giant technicolor mouth. Unfortunately, mass production of the plastic furniture remained elusive. Castle was invariably ahead of the curve, and in this case, too much so, at least for commercial purposes. In 1973, his own home was probably the only place in the whole country where one could see so much American-made plastic design in use.
This spirit of cutting-edge innovation would continue throughout the remainder of Castle’s career, even as times changed. In this respect, too, he was exemplary of his generation. The counterculture’s most extreme forms, like almost all utopian projects, quickly ran its course; the 1980s would be marked by a conservative backlash and a return to enthusiastic competitive consumerism. Yet both the counterculture and the craft movement were tremendously influential, far exceeding their relatively small demographic footprint. As Peter Coyote, the activist, actor, and founder of the neo-anarchist Diggers, has argued, “we failed in all our political agendas, but on a cultural level, we won everything.” Wherever you look in American culture today—in music, food, clothing, architecture, and yes, in the world of ideas—you can see and feel the widespread influence of the craft movement and the counterculture. It is proof that just a few people, if they are sufficiently determined to rethink their own reality, can have an outsized importance.
Certainly, this is one way of viewing Castle’s later work — and perhaps a way that he himself viewed it. Witness his Forgotten Dream table, made just a couple of years before his passing, which shares its cloud-like contours with many other works in the show, whether they date to his early or later years. A thought bubble made manifest; it invites us to think, in turn, and to reconsider what an object can do and be. Like everything Castle made over the course of his long career, it shifts the space around it simply by virtue of its own extraordinary existence. If that’s not a dream worth living up to, I don’t know what would be.
