Just four months ago, recalls R & Company co-founder Evan Snyderman, an 85-year-old Wendell Castle sat on the concrete floor of his Scottsville, New York studio, chisel in hand, carving away at his latest creation.
"That’s what makes him a true artist," Snyderman says of the prolific woodworker, designer, and sculptor who died Saturday evening at his home outside of Rochester. "He’s always on to the next thing; he’s more interested in the future than the past."
At the beginning of his 60-year career, "artist" was not a word used to describe the makers of chairs and tables. But Castle, who was born in Emporia, Kansas in 1932, studied industrial design and sculpture at the University of Kansas, and moved to New York in the early 1960s, where he became an Artist in Residence and professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and set up a studio in nearby Scottsville, has spent a lifetime earning the title, filling countless notebooks, galleries, and museums with an endless stream of ideas that teeter on the edge of art and design.
"Wendell will forever be remembered as the man who changed the way we view contemporary furniture in America," says Snyderman. The son of two Philadelphia-based furniture dealers who worked with Castle, Snyderman has known Castle for most of his life. "He really changed the game. He helped all of us understand that furniture can exist as an expression equal to any other art form."
Two stack-laminated and carved oak chairs circa 1977.
"He’s such a unique figure," says Glenn Adamson former head of New York's Museum of Arts and Design. "He was able to present himself convincingly to the worlds of sculpture, craft, and design. You just don’t get many people—certainly not in America—who have that presence in discrete fields of creativity. He was a triple threat."
In 1996, Castle published 10 Adopted Rules of Thumb, a sort of Ten Commandments that served as advice for himself and other creative people. On it, he listed "If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it," "After learning the tricks of the trade, don't think you know the trade," and "If it's offbeat or surprising it's probably useful."
His constant pursuit of new ways of doing things—of achieving the never-before-achieved—led him to make major conceptual leaps in the realms of both furniture and sculpture. His earliest creations—biomorphic pieces inspired by pioneering craftspeople like Wharton Esherick—made him a rising star of the studio art and craft scene of the 1960s. The stack lamination process he developed that same decade liberated him to create virtually any shape out of wood. And in the 1970s, with an eye toward the Italian Radical scene, he began making brightly hued works in molded plastic. In recent years, 3-D printing technologies and robots have made way for more unprecedented shapes that merge form and function.
.jpeg)
A selection of Castle's 1970s molded plastic pieces.
"Wood, I realized, could be shaped and formed and carved in ways limited only by my imagination," he famously said. And throughout his career, in dealings with wood or other materials, he rarely let his imagination—or technology—stop him.
"His compositions are about articulating presence in a void whether he was doing it was lamination and chainsaws or with a robot," says Adamson. In the realm of American design—where furniture, in many cases, was just furniture. That innovation cannot be overstated.
Says Noah Wunsch, of the Wunsch Americana Foundation who awarded Castle Eric M. Wunsch Award for Excellence in The American Arts just last week at Christie's: "He took what was traditionally a very stayed category, mired in tradition and he transformed the notion of what furniture could be."
Castle's work was not without challenge. There were times when his ideas outpaced the day's technology. Notably, the things he couldn't make never left his mind, and in a 2015 show at New York's MAD museum Wendell Castle Remastered he looked back at things he'd dreamt up decades ago and used new technologies—3D scanning, 3D modeling, and computer-controlled milling—to create what was once impossible.
For Embracing Upheaval, a 2017 show at Friedman Benda, Castle created new works using a robot.
Not surprisingly, that was only the beginning of his experimentation with those innovative ways of making. At his latest show of robot-produced works—just last June at Friedman Benda—Castle filled the New York gallery with wild new works that continued to break ground, process-wise, and feed the minds of a growing crop of young designers who are much more comfortable with furniture that doesn't behave so much like furniture.
"We’re so used to the idea of design being building a chair," explains Misha Kahn, a Brooklyn-based designer also represented by Friedman Benda known for his far-out riffs on functionality. "He opened up all these new way of looking at it as more of a sculpture."
Through the decades, Castle's works have not only landed coveted spots in museum collections—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum are all proud owners—but in homes, where they dutifully serve their intended purposes as seats, tables, and beyond.
"It’s such an interesting body of work because it crosses between design and sculpture and sits in that place where it can be seen as either," says Design Miami executive director and designer Rodman Primack who has incorporated Castle's works into several design projects and seen his oeuvre hold the floor year after year at Design Miami.
Chair with Sport Coat, a 1978 trompe l'oeil sculpture and seat.
“We just purchased two major pieces of Wendell’s work less than a month ago for a project in New York," says another fan, designer Steven Volpe. "One was a spectacular stack-laminated rosewood cocktail table from 1966. The other was an early metallic blue gel-coated fiberglass table over wood. Depending on where his pieces are placed, they absorb themselves into rooms. They are art.”
Castle's legacy is still in the making. Noah Wunsch and his brother Eric will unveil a collaboration with Castle (Noah calls it a "large, staggering work") in the coming months, an exhibition of Castle's contemporary work will be mounted at Kansas City's Nelson Atkins museum of Art in June, and a show of early creations is in the planning stages at R & Company.
Castle, we can safely assume, would be pleased with the packed itinerary: "I don’t think there’s a day in his life when he didn’t sketch or draw or make something," says Friedman Benda founder Marc Benda. "His mind never stopped. There was way more than he would ever realize and he knew that. He was not in a rush. He just kept on going and never looked back."
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/wendell-castle-father-of-american-art-furniture-dies-at-85
Bush71
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento