One night in the spring of 1968

One night in the spring of 1968, Rosemarie Castoro rode a bicycle along a. circuit encompassing twenty square blocks of midtown Manhattan. "I
had a gallon of paint attached to my bike, with a hole in the bottom," she recently recalled. "As long as I kept moving, there was a line of drips. Once, when I had to stop at a red light, a man in a car pointed out that the paint had begun to puddle. Actually, I used quite a lot—four gallons—and it took me three hours. Afterwards, I went to Max's, which was the artists' bar in those days. Also, St. Adrian's, which was farther downtown. Anyway, I went back the next day to photograph the drips. It was part of a series of pieces called Streetwork, organized by Scott Burton and John Perreault. We would just do them and run away."

Usually, Castoro's lines were solid: long strips of aluminum tape applied to a floor or the city pavement. "These were my Cracking pieces," Castoro says. "The idea was that the line would crack open the floor or the city, and things would emerge. I even stuck a length of tape to my own face." Of these works, she says, "When you break something open, you see what's inside. You bring the inside out." When Castoro used line to break open the box of gallery space, what came out was a new possibility for line itself. The Minimalists had used it to structure matter. With the sheer perspicuity of their objects, they declared that emotions, the human form, and the ordinary world were beside the point of art. Castoro found that the minimalist line was flexible. Its authority was versatile. It could be used to structure all the feelings, forms, and drifts of daily incident that Minimalism had dismissed.

On her canvases of the late 1960s, pencil lines crisscrossed in seemingly random patterns, and they look random even after the artist explains their rationale. "When I was outside the studio, I would make lists of everything I did. I wanted to know what I was doing. Back in the studio, these lists became patterns that I plotted on my canvases, and the lines show how the points in the pattern are linked." Thus, a hermetic system turns the flow of ordinary activity into elegant but impenetrable drawings on canvas. With these works, Castoro made line the trajectory of intuition, a device for mapping her sense that all the elements of experience are interconnected. As the 1960s ended, Castoro turned the canvas into a free-standing panel: a wall of sorts, where interior and exterior meet. Joined in tight-angled configurations, these planes- allude to foyers, corners, corridors. Brushing a mixture of gesso and graphite onto their surfaces, Castoro persuaded her line to give up its rigidity. Though her patterns still defied interpretation, their textures made immediate sense as the traces of an activity. She was insinuating the improvisations of her hand onto flat surfaces shaped by

straight edges: formal simplicities learned from Minimalism. As her layers of gesso grew thicker, Castoro's gesture grew more sinuous. Wide forms like brushstrokes detached themselves from the panels to become planes in their own right. Mounted on walls, they invited an expressionist reading and then deflected it. Clear about the process that generated them, these objects were emotionally opaque.

Shortening her sculptures, slimming them down, Castoro gave her three-dimensional works the look of two-dimensional lines. The wall was their page, where their wriggly contortions suggested the human form. Yet the schematism of her minimalist heritage persisted, preventing her art from becoming figurative in any reassuring sense of the word. If one insists, her skinny wall pieces of the early 1970s are images of the body. They are more believable as a calligraphic inventory of notionally human postures: a set of permutations comparable to Sol LeWitt's. Thickening again, her line left the wall to form a variety of shapes—tunnels, ladders, poles. The tunnels can be seen as rib cages, the poles as trees, yet these works guide the imagination to no familiar landscape. They offer no targets for our empathy. For all their handmade idiosyncrasy, Castoro's lines are as impersonal as the edges that define a minimalist box.

… media pieces addressed themselves to a world at the scale of the one Rosemarie Castoro fit into a casual grid she drew on a sheet of typing paper in 1971.

Near the upper left-hand corner of the page is a rectangle containing two dots. One dot represents her and the other represents Carl Andre, then her husband. The rectangle is their loft in SoHo. Three rectangles crawling with dots are the artists' bars of the time: St. Adrian's, on Broadway near Bleecker Street; Max's Kansas City, on Park Avenue South just above Union Square; and Les Levine's Longview Country Club, across the avenue from Max's. That is the nocturnal zone of the grid. In the daylit zone, the rectangles represent stores, movies, restaurants, bookstores, and so on. Another row lists activities: painting, drawing, making money. Castoro entitled her grid picture a "Sociology of City Living." Yet few New Yorkers live in lofts and make art. The city of art is a small metropolis.