Minimal Art
MINIMAL PERIOD (1968-1975)
THE MINIMALIST LINE: Mario Castillo's interest in anatomy was focused in drawing full scale nudes which later he would abstract to their essential lines. Henri Matisse was influential in this process with his series of four "Backs"bas-reliefs (1909-1930). In Castillo's case, he took the front of the female and he wanted to go beyond Matisse's 4th female back and do a fifth and a sixth, etc. These lines eventually became more and more basic, horizontal, and straight, giving way to Mario Castillo's Minimal Art work.
His Mankind Symbol series also had a tendency to become minimal towards the end, especially in drawings. During this period Castillo relied on the reigning theory of the day, "Less is More"
INSTALLATION ART: At one point the lines which Mario Castillo would either draw or paint, became lines made out of graphic color tape on paper. Then he started to use ribbon, felt, foam, and other materials on the wall, floor, and ceiling of the exhibition area which became the backdrop for these pieces. It was here that Mario Castillo first recognized the significance of the gallery room as part of the structure of his work. The room environment became the "pedestal"for the "sculptural"artwork. These pieces were instant art oriented, some became involved with process, light, and shadows. Basically these were Castillo's first installations. It was around 1968 that Castillo developed this tendency to deal with the environment of the exhibition space as an integral part of his artwork.
The delineated volumes in space became volumes which were suspended within the empty space of the room from wall to wall or from ceiling to floor. The white elastic chord pieces were literally entered into the walls, floor, and ceilings. Mario Castillo had to actually drill holes to get them installed. This became problematic since some galleries did not want their walls or floors drilled.
CONCEPTUAL ART: Eventually Mario Castillo drilled two holes opposite each other on facing walls and just left them like that and titled it "Negative Line". saw this piece and had very favorable comments for Castillo. This was the culmination piece for his "less is more"odyssey. His work had also become conceptual in nature and was also involved with primal notions related to the primitivism and Arte Povera influences that were prevalent during that period.
Thus Mario Castillo came to chisel the wall which became the essence (object and subject) of his work. Walls which for centuries had been the backdrop for paintings, all of the sudden became the most important element of his work. At first the carved lines were raw and crude and later they became more rectilinear. In both instances the objective was to deal with the discarded chiseled material from the wall as part of the totality of the piece. Good examples of these are the "X"displacements, where he took the discarded material from one wall and placed it below the carved line on the opposite wall and vice versa. This was the period of the subtractive linear displacements. These could be seen by some as a form of high art graffiti while at the same time incorporating conceptual art into them. But for Castillo this was more about Arte Povera and attempting to make art with no materials at all, just what was available in the room.
These provocative art works evolved into more symbolic burials in the wall. Mario Castillo felt these were closely related to his everlasting themes of life and death. Castillo at this time did an anthropological piece with DNA burials. These semen burials were directly related to the Mexican holy day of the Día de los Muertos. The piece became very controversial and it was censored by the Cal Arts Administration. It was even mentioned in Art News magazine in an article about Cal Arts. It was also a Garbage Archeology Piece. Since it was an interactive piece that went out into the world to interrelate with the Art World's major Art Museums and Galleries, one of its options was for people to treat it as a study of present day society once they would throw the work into the trash, and then proceeded to examine the disposed contents to make a present day analysis of our contemporary civilization.
It is of interest to note that around the time Castillo was doing this project, without his being aware of it, anthropology students at the University of Arizona were doing the same thing with a trash sorting project which they studied from an anthropological point of view.
Castillo had been using bodily fluids in his work since 1965 and it was not until 1995 that he learned that Jackson Pollock had also used them. Then in 2000 he learned that Marcel Duchamp had also used semen in his art. Because of the obvious sexual nature of this art Mario Castillo had always been hesitant to tell people about this phase of his work, but after learning about other major artists using the same material, he started to lose his inhibitions about this. This gave him confidence because he started to feel that he was a member of a special club of artists. Mario Castillo stopped working with Semen Acrylic in 1998. You can look for his essay on "A Generation of Semen Art".
But aside from the overt nature of his art, Castillo confirms that these works were about Body Art, which he wanted to incorporate into his work, and going beyond this, they were also about Spirituality, Genealogy, and what he calls Archeology of the Mind. In 1993 he came up with this name for an exhibit at Columbia College scheduled for winter of 1993-94. Mario Castillo believes that if we were able to "excavate"our minds, we would uncover a universe of information about ourselves and where we come from.
BODY ART: Mario Castillo's interest in Performance Art and using his body as an art material was influenced by the Fluxes Movement in Europe and Allen Kaprow's Happenings in America. Another "Happening" piece was involved with the shaving off a line from the body hair on his chest and ritualistically gathering people to "watch" it grow back to see the line disappear. This was documented as a silkscreen in 1969, but it was not performed until 2004. In 1970, Mario Castillo performed a "how to shave" piece with Allan Kaprow and Paul Brach at the EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) Conference at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.
PERFORMANCE ART: Across from the semen burial was another piece which was a symbolic burial of Castillo's body. He shaved off all of his body hair, which he considered as a physical aura and placed it in glass slides. Then he entered them into 20 slots in the wall. Castillo then did a performance piece (1972) with this work. For 24 hours he played an electronic music piece he created on the Buchla Synthesizer (Music Box) while with eyes closed he went back and forth touching the wall where he had buried his symbolic body. The music was what he called at the time, Fictional ethno Electronic Music, and according to listeners, they said it sounded like music from Tibet. This piece signaled the death of Castillo's involvement with the avant-garde of the seventies. But he continued doing "new art"pieces through 1975 and then again in 2003-04.
MINIMAL ART: Mario Castillo started to do installations and process art when he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968 and continued this very important period in his work through 1974 and beyond. Even though this work was Minimalist, it still retained a Mexican influence in the fact that some of the tape and ribbon pieces were very colorful and that the burial pieces dealing with matter passing into another space or dimension, made reference to the transcendental nature of The Day of the Dead. Some of the Subtracted Displacements made reference to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán.
SHADOW PIECES: The use of actual shadows in Mario Castillo's work resulted from his interest in doing still life paintings which had a strong emphasis on shadows. The shadows became a totally integrated part of the whole composition, bringing with them double meaning and at times transforming the realistic work into an almost surreal piece. Pearlstein's paintings were influential in getting Castillo to pay attention to shadows in his paintings and Robert Irwin in his installations.
Eventually his installations also played-up shadows, making them a significant part of the work. Mario Castillo became intrigued with how such an ephemeral thing as a shadow can give validity to what we see as reality or the illusion of it (as in Realism). But he became more interested on how, as an artist one can make shadows disappear (as in an installation where they are skillfully painted out) or appear (by painting them in), when there are actually no real shadows there. In 2004 he did such shadow pieces at the Glass Curtain Gallery and at the National Museum of Mexican art.
INSTANT ART: Mario Castillo was very much influenced by Marcel Duchamp and his instantaneous art pieces; his famous ready-mades. So Castillo took this idea of doing installations that would last for a certain amount of time, recognizing that nothing lasts forever and if something that lasts for a few minutes to a few hours or days can leave a lasting impression on someone it accomplishes the same thing as a work which lasts longer. Castillo liked the idea of walking into a gallery space with a small paper bag (with rolls of tape in it) and quickly putting up a piece that could fill up the whole room in a short period of time. At times he would use other commercial materials. These were Castillo's Instant Art pieces which in essence were installations.
PROCESS ART: These pieces deal with the passage of time and how it affects and changes things:
1. Folded up canvas collecting dust to document time in its soiled creases.
2. The markings of colored water on materials such as Plexiglas as it evaporated through time.
3. There are other "Life Activity" pieces related to daily life's ordinary actions in which the passing of time is an important factor.
An example of "Life as Art" is when Mario Castillo shook the hand of Paul McCarthy (the visual artist) in LA in 1970 and did not let go for 15 minutes, staring blankly at him. Paul was very gracious and very nervous. Not knowing what to do, he finally just went along with it. At the end Castillo explained to McCarthy that he had just experienced one of his "Life"art pieces. Mario Castillo's friends who were with him (Darold Roach and Joel King) were also caught off guard and became agitated about his actions and they just stood by nervously laughing at times while Castillo was dead silent through the whole piece.
CAGE and RILEY MINIMALISM: Early in 1968 Mario Castillo fell under the influence of musique concrète and the revolutionary work of John Cage. Sensing the potential of John Cage's noise theories, Castillo started to record his environmental sound pieces. He has sound recordings of bus rides and simply walking down streets. These were just ordinary activities from daily life, but Mario Castillo was impressed with the idea that one could use the element of chance and make musical pieces with noise. Later, he transposed these ideas into visual pieces dealing with chance in film, sound recording, and photographic imagery.
In one of his taped pieces, he walked along State Street in downtown Chicago, recording the street sounds going North on the East side and then he walked across and headed South on the West side. He called this "Two Parallel Lines Becoming One Line". Castillo also filmed the four corners of a city block to show the daily activity at the four defining points of a square. He also photographed the four corners of a city block and then superimposed the photographs over each other to transparently show a 3D square as a flat image that captured the essence of a geometric shape while reducing it to "nothingness". The physical nature of a square now became incomprehensible, only existing as 4 coordinates in the viewers mind. Another of his sound pieces required taping a city block (square) all along its periphery. This he titled "Square as a Spiral", because of the reel to reel taping the real reality of the city square was literally being coiled into a spiral.
One of Mario Castillo's first sound compositions was used in the opening of a student film festival at the main auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. This piece makes use of the sounds of a toilet flushing combined with a guitar being played by the oscillating motion of a fork woven through the strings. It was at SAIC where, after these concrete music experiments, Castillo started to explore the potential of animated soundtrack music. While at Cal Arts, the work of Canadian filmmaker, Norman McLaren became an important influence for Castillo's experiments in which the film images create the soundtrack. You hear the sound as you see the image that produced it and you see the image and you hear its sound.
Later when Mario Castillo listened to Terry Riley's "In C"and "Rainbow in Curved Air", he knew where he wanted to go with his animated soundtracks. Riley's minimalist approach to music captured Castillo's imagination, because of Riley's capability to induce meditative and trance like experiences with repetitive harmonic sounds. His rich patterns achieved with sequencers gave Castillo the idea to use film loops to simulate a similar feeling. In this way, through loops, Mario Castillo created his first animated soundtrack piece for film. Actually, Mario Castillo has played "Rainbow in Curved Air" with his Animated Soundtrack film and it seems to be made for it.
Arte Povera
Henri Matisse
Marcel Duchamp Allan Kaprow
Jackson Pollock
Paul McCarthy
Robert Irwin
Norman McLaren
Terry Riley
John Cage
Paul Brach
E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology)
Buchla Synthesizer
THE MINIMALIST LINE: Mario Castillo's interest in anatomy was focused in drawing full scale nudes which later he would abstract to their essential lines. Henri Matisse was influential in this process with his series of four "Backs"bas-reliefs (1909-1930). In Castillo's case, he took the front of the female and he wanted to go beyond Matisse's 4th female back and do a fifth and a sixth, etc. These lines eventually became more and more basic, horizontal, and straight, giving way to Mario Castillo's Minimal Art work.
His Mankind Symbol series also had a tendency to become minimal towards the end, especially in drawings. During this period Castillo relied on the reigning theory of the day, "Less is More"
INSTALLATION ART: At one point the lines which Mario Castillo would either draw or paint, became lines made out of graphic color tape on paper. Then he started to use ribbon, felt, foam, and other materials on the wall, floor, and ceiling of the exhibition area which became the backdrop for these pieces. It was here that Mario Castillo first recognized the significance of the gallery room as part of the structure of his work. The room environment became the "pedestal"for the "sculptural"artwork. These pieces were instant art oriented, some became involved with process, light, and shadows. Basically these were Castillo's first installations. It was around 1968 that Castillo developed this tendency to deal with the environment of the exhibition space as an integral part of his artwork.
The delineated volumes in space became volumes which were suspended within the empty space of the room from wall to wall or from ceiling to floor. The white elastic chord pieces were literally entered into the walls, floor, and ceilings. Mario Castillo had to actually drill holes to get them installed. This became problematic since some galleries did not want their walls or floors drilled.
CONCEPTUAL ART: Eventually Mario Castillo drilled two holes opposite each other on facing walls and just left them like that and titled it "Negative Line". saw this piece and had very favorable comments for Castillo. This was the culmination piece for his "less is more"odyssey. His work had also become conceptual in nature and was also involved with primal notions related to the primitivism and Arte Povera influences that were prevalent during that period.
Thus Mario Castillo came to chisel the wall which became the essence (object and subject) of his work. Walls which for centuries had been the backdrop for paintings, all of the sudden became the most important element of his work. At first the carved lines were raw and crude and later they became more rectilinear. In both instances the objective was to deal with the discarded chiseled material from the wall as part of the totality of the piece. Good examples of these are the "X"displacements, where he took the discarded material from one wall and placed it below the carved line on the opposite wall and vice versa. This was the period of the subtractive linear displacements. These could be seen by some as a form of high art graffiti while at the same time incorporating conceptual art into them. But for Castillo this was more about Arte Povera and attempting to make art with no materials at all, just what was available in the room.
These provocative art works evolved into more symbolic burials in the wall. Mario Castillo felt these were closely related to his everlasting themes of life and death. Castillo at this time did an anthropological piece with DNA burials. These semen burials were directly related to the Mexican holy day of the Día de los Muertos. The piece became very controversial and it was censored by the Cal Arts Administration. It was even mentioned in Art News magazine in an article about Cal Arts. It was also a Garbage Archeology Piece. Since it was an interactive piece that went out into the world to interrelate with the Art World's major Art Museums and Galleries, one of its options was for people to treat it as a study of present day society once they would throw the work into the trash, and then proceeded to examine the disposed contents to make a present day analysis of our contemporary civilization.
It is of interest to note that around the time Castillo was doing this project, without his being aware of it, anthropology students at the University of Arizona were doing the same thing with a trash sorting project which they studied from an anthropological point of view.
Castillo had been using bodily fluids in his work since 1965 and it was not until 1995 that he learned that Jackson Pollock had also used them. Then in 2000 he learned that Marcel Duchamp had also used semen in his art. Because of the obvious sexual nature of this art Mario Castillo had always been hesitant to tell people about this phase of his work, but after learning about other major artists using the same material, he started to lose his inhibitions about this. This gave him confidence because he started to feel that he was a member of a special club of artists. Mario Castillo stopped working with Semen Acrylic in 1998. You can look for his essay on "A Generation of Semen Art".
But aside from the overt nature of his art, Castillo confirms that these works were about Body Art, which he wanted to incorporate into his work, and going beyond this, they were also about Spirituality, Genealogy, and what he calls Archeology of the Mind. In 1993 he came up with this name for an exhibit at Columbia College scheduled for winter of 1993-94. Mario Castillo believes that if we were able to "excavate"our minds, we would uncover a universe of information about ourselves and where we come from.
BODY ART: Mario Castillo's interest in Performance Art and using his body as an art material was influenced by the Fluxes Movement in Europe and Allen Kaprow's Happenings in America. Another "Happening" piece was involved with the shaving off a line from the body hair on his chest and ritualistically gathering people to "watch" it grow back to see the line disappear. This was documented as a silkscreen in 1969, but it was not performed until 2004. In 1970, Mario Castillo performed a "how to shave" piece with Allan Kaprow and Paul Brach at the EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) Conference at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.
PERFORMANCE ART: Across from the semen burial was another piece which was a symbolic burial of Castillo's body. He shaved off all of his body hair, which he considered as a physical aura and placed it in glass slides. Then he entered them into 20 slots in the wall. Castillo then did a performance piece (1972) with this work. For 24 hours he played an electronic music piece he created on the Buchla Synthesizer (Music Box) while with eyes closed he went back and forth touching the wall where he had buried his symbolic body. The music was what he called at the time, Fictional ethno Electronic Music, and according to listeners, they said it sounded like music from Tibet. This piece signaled the death of Castillo's involvement with the avant-garde of the seventies. But he continued doing "new art"pieces through 1975 and then again in 2003-04.
MINIMAL ART: Mario Castillo started to do installations and process art when he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968 and continued this very important period in his work through 1974 and beyond. Even though this work was Minimalist, it still retained a Mexican influence in the fact that some of the tape and ribbon pieces were very colorful and that the burial pieces dealing with matter passing into another space or dimension, made reference to the transcendental nature of The Day of the Dead. Some of the Subtracted Displacements made reference to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán.
SHADOW PIECES: The use of actual shadows in Mario Castillo's work resulted from his interest in doing still life paintings which had a strong emphasis on shadows. The shadows became a totally integrated part of the whole composition, bringing with them double meaning and at times transforming the realistic work into an almost surreal piece. Pearlstein's paintings were influential in getting Castillo to pay attention to shadows in his paintings and Robert Irwin in his installations.
Eventually his installations also played-up shadows, making them a significant part of the work. Mario Castillo became intrigued with how such an ephemeral thing as a shadow can give validity to what we see as reality or the illusion of it (as in Realism). But he became more interested on how, as an artist one can make shadows disappear (as in an installation where they are skillfully painted out) or appear (by painting them in), when there are actually no real shadows there. In 2004 he did such shadow pieces at the Glass Curtain Gallery and at the National Museum of Mexican art.
INSTANT ART: Mario Castillo was very much influenced by Marcel Duchamp and his instantaneous art pieces; his famous ready-mades. So Castillo took this idea of doing installations that would last for a certain amount of time, recognizing that nothing lasts forever and if something that lasts for a few minutes to a few hours or days can leave a lasting impression on someone it accomplishes the same thing as a work which lasts longer. Castillo liked the idea of walking into a gallery space with a small paper bag (with rolls of tape in it) and quickly putting up a piece that could fill up the whole room in a short period of time. At times he would use other commercial materials. These were Castillo's Instant Art pieces which in essence were installations.
PROCESS ART: These pieces deal with the passage of time and how it affects and changes things:
1. Folded up canvas collecting dust to document time in its soiled creases.
2. The markings of colored water on materials such as Plexiglas as it evaporated through time.
3. There are other "Life Activity" pieces related to daily life's ordinary actions in which the passing of time is an important factor.
An example of "Life as Art" is when Mario Castillo shook the hand of Paul McCarthy (the visual artist) in LA in 1970 and did not let go for 15 minutes, staring blankly at him. Paul was very gracious and very nervous. Not knowing what to do, he finally just went along with it. At the end Castillo explained to McCarthy that he had just experienced one of his "Life"art pieces. Mario Castillo's friends who were with him (Darold Roach and Joel King) were also caught off guard and became agitated about his actions and they just stood by nervously laughing at times while Castillo was dead silent through the whole piece.
CAGE and RILEY MINIMALISM: Early in 1968 Mario Castillo fell under the influence of musique concrète and the revolutionary work of John Cage. Sensing the potential of John Cage's noise theories, Castillo started to record his environmental sound pieces. He has sound recordings of bus rides and simply walking down streets. These were just ordinary activities from daily life, but Mario Castillo was impressed with the idea that one could use the element of chance and make musical pieces with noise. Later, he transposed these ideas into visual pieces dealing with chance in film, sound recording, and photographic imagery.
In one of his taped pieces, he walked along State Street in downtown Chicago, recording the street sounds going North on the East side and then he walked across and headed South on the West side. He called this "Two Parallel Lines Becoming One Line". Castillo also filmed the four corners of a city block to show the daily activity at the four defining points of a square. He also photographed the four corners of a city block and then superimposed the photographs over each other to transparently show a 3D square as a flat image that captured the essence of a geometric shape while reducing it to "nothingness". The physical nature of a square now became incomprehensible, only existing as 4 coordinates in the viewers mind. Another of his sound pieces required taping a city block (square) all along its periphery. This he titled "Square as a Spiral", because of the reel to reel taping the real reality of the city square was literally being coiled into a spiral.
One of Mario Castillo's first sound compositions was used in the opening of a student film festival at the main auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. This piece makes use of the sounds of a toilet flushing combined with a guitar being played by the oscillating motion of a fork woven through the strings. It was at SAIC where, after these concrete music experiments, Castillo started to explore the potential of animated soundtrack music. While at Cal Arts, the work of Canadian filmmaker, Norman McLaren became an important influence for Castillo's experiments in which the film images create the soundtrack. You hear the sound as you see the image that produced it and you see the image and you hear its sound.
Later when Mario Castillo listened to Terry Riley's "In C"and "Rainbow in Curved Air", he knew where he wanted to go with his animated soundtracks. Riley's minimalist approach to music captured Castillo's imagination, because of Riley's capability to induce meditative and trance like experiences with repetitive harmonic sounds. His rich patterns achieved with sequencers gave Castillo the idea to use film loops to simulate a similar feeling. In this way, through loops, Mario Castillo created his first animated soundtrack piece for film. Actually, Mario Castillo has played "Rainbow in Curved Air" with his Animated Soundtrack film and it seems to be made for it.
Arte Povera
Henri Matisse
Marcel Duchamp Allan Kaprow
Jackson Pollock
Paul McCarthy
Robert Irwin
Norman McLaren
Terry Riley
John Cage
Paul Brach
E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology)
Buchla Synthesizer
