STORY BY JOHN PERREAULT
Serious art exhibitions usually consist of works by a single artist or, less often, thoughtful theme shows. The Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia (202 North 3rd Street), known for art furniture and secondary-market glass art, offers us a third possibility: the two-person exhibition as an exercise in provocative comparisons. Through February 29, recent works by furniture-art kingpin Wendell Castle and prints by top-notch Photorealist Chuck Close are surprisingly juxtaposed.
Artists are said to dislike comparisons, but in this case Castle and Close are so highly ranked in their respective fields that similarities and differences can only illuminate both.
Castle is celebrated in the craft world as the founder of art furniture. As opposed to elders Wharton Esherwick and George Nakashima, he has captured a higher profile because of the variety and adventurousness of his work—which ranges from signature stacked-laminate pieces, to the now highly collectable fiberglass Molar Series, a brief run of trompe l’oeil, and a still lingering blast of Memphis. Furthermore, his influence as a teacher cannot be disputed.
The recent Castles in the Wexler foray are a kind of Castle Redux, but what a Redux. With the tables called Bud and Buddy and the swooping lounge chair, aptly named Phoenix, Castle recaptures his carved laminate crown. The exquisitely finished stained walnut looks like ebony, if ebony can be both black and buttery. His Molar Series, launched in 1969, was a critical success but a commercial failure. Made of fiberglass, the Molar Chair with its bright Pop monochromatic colors is now a design icon. His new fiberglass pieces—the Nirvana chair and a love seat called Mr. Henry —are spray-painted in spectacular automobile finishes. All the works, save Phoenix and an egg-shaped computer desk, are in editions of eight.
Although Castle has the showroom floor, spectacular prints by Close hold their own on the walls. All are, as expected, single-image portraits, transcribed square-by-square from grid-inscribed photographs of the artist’s friends or of himself. Close’s debut as a Photorealist painter in 1967 consisted of giant black and white, hand-painted versions of mug-shot blow-ups so realistically rendered that many took them for the photographs they copied. He moved to color and then to leaving the grids exposed, using his own fingerprints (see the print Leslie/Fingerprint, 1986) and then geometric squiggles to fill-in the squares.
Close now makes a point of method and process, whereas Castle—who also always presents cool surfaces—continues to erase all traces of the hand. Thus they reverse the craft/art clichés.
Close’s print editions range from 45 to 80. The print selection here includes three silkscreens: James, 2004, uses 178 colors; Lyle, 2003 employs 149; and Self-Portrait, 1995 (Close’s first silkscreen) a mere 80. Three etchings and one wood-block print, all self-portraits, round out the selection and remind the viewer that possibly only ceramic artist Robert Arneson is more famous for his self-portraits.
But here is the important question: What does Castle have to do with art?
Moving away from the out-dated use of the word craft as merely skillful making, it is more helpful to describe contemporary craft as—like sculpture, painting, or photography—one grouping of things under the rubric of Art with a capitol “A”. In this regard, Castle’s furniture is art because he intends it to be; and, at least in the craft world, it is thought of and treated as such.
But is it sculpture? The artist himself sometimes claims it is, as do some of his apologists. There is no doubt that the work is sculptural, but the fact remains that it has not yet been accepted as sculpture by the art world proper.
Castle (b. 1932) did indeed study sculpture and design, but his traveling retrospective, initiated by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1989, ended up at the American Craft Museum in New York in 1991. Close (b. 1940) studied painting at Yale. His retrospective in 1998 was across the street from the Craft Museum at the Museum of Modern Art. Castle’s furniture (even in small editions) sells for half the price of a Close print.
Is the difference that Close has ideas and concepts and Castle does not? Close’s concepts could also be characterized as self-imposed limits. It’s as if he has said to himself that he would only make frontal, headshot portraits (or self-portraits) and thus refer to and sabotage both the portrait and the representational painting traditions. Castle’s equally complicated idea is that furniture can be art and even sculpture.
During the course of his career, Castle has worked in many styles and formats. His website currently features five different groupings: Angel Chairs, Star Furniture, Caligari, Picture Tables and The 13 Clocks. If you didn’t know your Castle, you might think they were by five different artists.
Close, in contrast, rather than digging many different wells, has labored at one well only. We could, of course, think of Castle as Picassoid and Close as Mondrianesque.
The Wexler juxtaposition is so inspired that more such exhibitions might be required, at least in one’s imagination. How about Dale Chihuly’s “Seaforms” and Andy Warhol’s “Flowers”? If that’s too obvious, could we compare Pat Steir waterfall paintings and Mary Shaffer slumped glass sculptures? Or how about age and gender diverse parings like George Segal’s plaster ghosts with Karen LaMonte’s cast glass dresses? Beth Lipman’s blown-glass still-life sculptures (or her photographs of same) with William Bailey’s austere still-life paintings? Like Castle and Close, it’s all certainly worth considering.
