Making Furniture Dance
Wendell Castle
“I gave up making sculpture in 1962 to devote myself full time to making furniture. I made this decision with a clear conscience. I felt furniture of a certain type is the same as sculpture, just as important in every way.” — Wendell Castle
Our culture is based on the assumption that the young are incapable of achieving great feats, but within the artistic sphere, at least, it’s clear that mastery can manifest at an early age. Whether these remarkable individuals are blessed with an innate talent, or simply benefit from being in the right place at the right time, is perhaps impossible to determine. It is of course largely irrelevant, for what really matters — a universal constant — is their ability to create original, honest work for which there is a receptive and appreciative audience. For Wendell Castle (b. Emporia, Kansas, 1932-2018), who has been described as the unofficial “father of the art furniture movement”, such a coalescence resulted in his most prolific period of work, between 1958 and 1980 (his mid-20s to late 40s). During this time he transitioned from a primarily art-based practice into one that could challenge the limits of furniture design — with his unique approach leaving an indelible mark on the industry and changing the way we think about making chairs, tables and other objects. Art + Auction magazine wrote that Castle was “… the only major American designer practicing on the cusp of art and design.” A good many people who interacted with Castle at some point in the last two decades of his life received an illustrated postcard he used as stationery, business card, and manifesto. Titled, My 10 adopted rules of thumb, a sort of ten commandments, it served as advice for himself and other creative people, including such folksy aphorisms as, “The dog that stays on the porch will find no bones,” as well as one particularly keen description of his work, “If it’s offbeat or surprising it’s probably useful.” To describe Castle’s impressive oeuvre one might more readily employ such adjectives as “innovative” and “groundbreaking”, over “offbeat” and “surprising”, but nevertheless, the artist’s work is in part revered because of what is, at heart, an unusual, perhaps unique, coalescence of offbeat, surprising, and useful.
Portrait of Wendell Castle (1969) by Doug Stewart. Image c/o Fendrick Gallery records, 1952-2001
“Abilene” rocker, stainless steel (2008) by Wendell Castle, image c/o Phillips
Castle’s work straddles both categories of serviceable furniture and fine art. The grandson of Midwestern farmers who survived the Great Depression, Castle, who was dyslexic, struggled in a small rural school in Kansas, where art wasn’t even offered as a subject option. “I was not good at anything,” he said. “The only exceptions were drawing and daydreaming, neither of which were valued.” Since the outset of his career, Castle’s vocabulary has always been whimsically organic, and whilst experimenting with biomorphic natural forms, his sculptural pieces coax wood into weird, mind bending shapes. In the era of Charles (1907-1978) and Ray Eames (1912-1988) and George Nelson (1908-1986), Castle trained first as an industrial designer at the University of Kansas, and then, as a sculptor (the sketchbooks from his student years, roughly 1954 to 58, are filled with drawings for abstract wood sculptures, some of which would later be brought to three-dimensional life as furniture). “Wood, I realized, could be shaped and formed and carved in ways limited only by my imagination,” Castle famously said. And throughout his career, in dealings with wood or other materials, he rarely let his imagination — or technology — stop him. Castle emerged into the field in the late 1950s, at a time when people who wrote about such things were struggling with definitions of craft, art, and design as the possibilities offered by mass industrialization changed the landscape. In 1964, Rose Slivka (1912-2004), editor-in-chief of the influential Craft Horizons (now American Craft Magazine), unpacked her interpretation of craft — of the handmade object — in a special issue devoted to “The American Craftsman.” In her essay, she identified three categories: “the artist-craftsmen, production craftsmen, production designers.” Using this text as a guide, many pieces which are today seen as 20th-century design icons fall into one or more of Slivka’s prescient archetypes. While Castle’s output touches each category at some point throughout his career, it’s Slivka’s description of the “artist-craftsmen” that captures his place among “those who make one-of-a-kind objects of superb expressive quality.” Slivka goes on to argue that this often meant function fell by the wayside.
Unique “Ghost Rider” rocking chair, bubinga (2010) by Wendell Castle, image c/o Phillips
Castle was certainly unconcerned with the idea that a chair had to have four legs, or that a table couldn’t hang from the ceiling, and although, arguably, his unrestricted sculptural furniture emphasized form over function, it in turn allowed for malleability in stylistic genres and materials; merging the detailing of traditional crafts with the engineering of industrial design. 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. If some furnishings seemed baffling, like a two-person chair with a square hole in the back of one seat, Castle explained that there was madness to his method. “If there was any continuity and logic in there, I wanted to throw that out of whack,” he told City Newspaper of Rochester in 2016. “There is no reason.” Blurring the line between art and design, Castle paved the road for what we now take for granted in the contemporary design world. As Times critic Joseph Giovannini noted, when the artist’s furniture appeared in galleries it was seen as “radical in fundamental ways: the visual presence of a piece now outweighed its function, design outweighed technique, and form was more important than material.” Importantly, though, Castle’s best pieces actually work; they are sturdy, comfortable, the right height and pitch. The artist once explained that while form is paramount, “the function must be there … A chair which is beautiful but cannot be sat in is nothing.” Even his Stool from 1963, which has four thin legs that simultaneously buckle inward and splay outward like a new-born foal, are at once delicate and sturdy.
Slivka describes the “craftsman’s involvement in total process — in the mastery of technology and the actual making of the object from beginning to end,” noting that, “the American loves his tools too much to leave that part of the fun to someone else.” It was Castle’s constant pursuit of new ways of doing things, of achieving the never before achieved, that led him to make major conceptual leaps in the realms of both furniture and sculpture. Unlike his predecessors in the American studio furniture movement — designers like George Nakashima (1905-1990) and Sam Maloof (1916-2009) — Castle eschewed traditional wood carving techniques and favoured stack lamination; gluing together thin, horizontal layers of wood, and then carving them (first using a chainsaw and later a robot), to create inventive forms and sculptural volumes. Whereas Esherick treated wood with reverence, emphasizing the grain, burl and natural contours of the tree, Castle was interested in form and volume. “I didn’t care about craftsmanship. I didn’t care about a burl,” Castle explained. “I didn’t really think of wood as being precious.” He tried working in bronze, but the casting was too expensive, and briefly, metal, but he didn’t like wearing a helmet, so wood, he said, was something of a default material. Undaunted by the restraints of conventional production techniques, he approached industrial production companies to help produce those pieces that were beyond his own abilities; in the late 1960s, with an eye toward the Italian Radical scene, he worked on his Molar collection (a series of hot-rod hued works in moulded plastic) with Beylerian Ltd and Stendig, where several of the artist’s models were produced. Castle consistently challenged the traditional boundaries of functional design, and it would, perhaps, be impossible to overstate the extent of the artist’s innovation. He took what in the realm of American design was a traditionally stayed category — and transformed the very notion of what furniture could be.
His studio in Scottsdale, New York, was a monument to tools and processes, incorporating certain aspects of the digital age — 3D modelling and computer-guided lathes, routers and milling machines — to aid in the creation of his monumental, sculptural furnishings. Of all of the studio’s tools, analogue or digital, his favourite, however, was the pencil. He drew obsessively and left behind thousands of casually beautiful, sure-handed sketches. “The purpose of a drawing is to generate ideas that become real things, not to make a beautiful drawing,” Castle said. “I have no use for computer renderings. The computer wants to iron out your lumps and bumps, and I don’t want them ironed out. I want it to still have some funkiness, not be too slick.” The artist spoke strongly about the “direct connection between the pencil and the brain. I think drawing and thinking really mesh, and with the computer, there’s a distance between them.” He cited the work of late architect Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) as an example of how others have used technology in a way he chose to avoid. “You can just tell that was all designed on the computer.”
Castle’s love for the tactile nature of mark making was palpable, with the way he described the weight of the hand-drawn line bordering on romantic. His curvaceous, biomorphic forms all started as freestyle drawings on rag paper. For the later laminated pieces, Castle carved miniature urethane models of future furniture that were 3D scanned — preserving each little nuance of the artist’s hand — and sculpted in slices by a two-and-a-half ton room-size robot, nicknamed Mr Chips (a very similar process to Castle’s original stack-lamination process). “Whatever progress there is in art,” he wrote, “comes not from adaptation, but through daring.” There is a sense of impending animation and personality in his stack-laminated wood pieces; yet, they avoid feeling cartoonish thanks to his craftsmanship, the rich hues of the wood, and the stately volume of space they occupy. He explained in an interview with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art that many of his surreal designs were inspired by youthful memories — of a wooden duck decoy he saw in a magazine, exaggerated cartoon images of elliptical wheels on accelerating vehicles, oblique images he recalled from the silent German horror film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”
“Cloud” shelf from the “Molar” series (2007) by Wendell Castle, image c/o Phillips
When Slivka wrote about the American craftsman, she was also reacting to “a society that already has more objects than it knows what to do with.” It was a time in America’s socio-cultural history that can be defined by a grotesque magnification of personal wealth, breeding rampant consumerism and a rapacious greed for manufactured Pop culture. Since the 2008 financial crisis, we’ve seen a mad amplification of the hyper-financialised luxury market (of course there’s no guarantee it will survive the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic). There is a movement — one gradually gaining momentum — to consider quality over quantity and to eschew mass-produced throw away furniture in favour of craft and expertise. Castle’s works exemplify this, and many throughout his career were commissioned by people seeking a connection between object and maker. Regarding his own work, Castle proclaimed that he wanted his furniture to be “collected like art and appreciated like art,” and he was heavily influenced by industrial designer Don Wallance’s (1909-1990) ideas regarding the convergence of art and utility. As a counterpoint to objects Slivka describes as being of “unremembered anonymity,” Castle’s ground-breaking unification of sculpture and furniture, serves as a counterpoint to the faceless banality of mass-produced high-street tat.
The divide between painting and “design as art” is becoming increasingly blurred, and more frequently museums are displaying furniture along with paintings and sculpture. Castle’s works are particularly relevant at a moment in design history when craft is making a comeback. To own a Castle piece is to own a unique sculpture you can actually use, despite what he might have claimed was guiding his conscience. In Castle’s world, ambiguity is intentional, even desirable. “Wendell is truly a sculptor who chose furniture as his medium,” says Evan Snyderman of R & Company, one of Castle’s New York dealers. “And he was one of the first American furniture-makers to blur the line between art and design. He paved the road for what we now take for granted in the contemporary design world.” At the beginning of his 60-year career, “artist” was not a word used to describe the makers of chairs and tables. “I invent, distort, deform, exaggerate, compound and confuse as I see it,” Castle wrote in 2016 for an exhibition of his work at the Rochester Institute. “I obey only my own instincts, which often I do not understand myself. I often draw things I do not understand, but am secure in the knowledge that they may at some point become clear and meaningful.”
Castle was truly unique in that he was able to present himself convincingly to the worlds of sculpture, craft and design. A 1989 headline in the Detroit Free Press declared him to be: “The man who makes furniture dance.” He was more interested in the future than the past and at Embracing Upheaval (2017), the last show before his death, he filled New York’s Friedman Benda Gallery with wild new robot-produced works that process-wise, continued to break ground. His oeuvre is so fascinating as it transects the boundary between design and sculpture and can be seen as either. For Castle, furniture and sculpture, form and function were one and the same. In a design statement for his exhibit Wendell Castle Imagined: A Revelation of Creative Process, the artist described the thinking behind his work as “a voyage of discovery,” built upon “thousands of ideas on paper, before getting an authentic one dragged up from my guts,” the result of his indomitable spirit of invention and avant-garde sensibilities. Throughout his career, Castle invented new vocabularies of form, as well as the means to realize them, rethinking functional objects — seating, tables, lighting — into sculptural, biomorphic creations, in wood, plastic and bronze, that almost defy categorization. His fluency in form and technique is apparent in each piece he made. “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.”