This Artist Created a Beautiful Metaphor of the Powerful Impact of a Book

Sometimes, art has a real impact on us. It is often unexplainable, and unpredictable, but it can leave a lasting impression. This piece of art is doing just that for a number of people.

First set up years ago, this art piece went viral and has since been reinstalled and set up in other museums and even re-made in different ways. Called ‘The Castle’, the artwork is a piece of installation art created by a Mexican artist. It has caught the attention of writers, readers, artists, and art critiques, and for good reason. Unlike a painting, an installation piece often takes up huge amounts of space, and this piece is doing just that, but not just physically.

The Castle

First appearing in 2007, The Castle is a 75 by 13 foot brick wall. It took up the entire length of the room it was placed in when it was first on display. The brick wall is made without mortar (the joining agent that is usually placed between bricks).

On the ground, beneath the brick wall, in the approximate center, is a book. The book is Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and it has a poignant effect on the wall. The presence of the book, albeit only such a small disturbance, causes the wall to arch around it. The entire column above the book arches around it, causing a break in the otherwise perfect and straight wall.

The idea behind The Castle, it seems, is the notion that ideas (or stories, fiction, writing, creativity — however you want to interpret it) have an impact, no matter how small. A small book, tiny in comparison to the huge wall above it, breaks the wall. A small idea, tiny in comparison to the systems it faces, can break them, too, is perhaps what Blake is suggesting. Or at least, that’s what the general consensus says.

Jorge Mendez Blake

Jorge Mendez Blake is a Mexican artist who works in mixed media. His background is in architecture, and that connection is ever-present in the art that he creates — just look at The Castle! He lives and works in Guadalajara, where he creates timely, poignant pieces that are designed to make the viewer stop and really think.

Blake’s art is all about the visual, and almost transitioning the metaphorical (an idea) into the physical. By doing so, he is able to make evident the material aspects and impacts of immaterial objects, which is something incredibly unique to him.

Across his art, he’s worked with literature written by a number of literary ‘greats’: Emily Dickinson, Jules Verne, Franz Kafka and James Joyce. In fact, the vast majority of his art tackles or deals with language, literature, language and poetry in some form or another. Whether it’s his I Declare I Will Defend Poetry piece from 2021, or the 203 piece Vestiges of Language IV.

The Use of Franz Kafka

A lot of critics have highlighted Blake’s use of Franz Kafka in particular for The Castle. Franz Kafka wrote privately, and a lot of his work was published posthumously, and several critics have tied this to the art itself. The idea that a small idea can have such an impact being representative of how Kafka, a man long dead, continues to have such an impact with his works.

Others link the ideas within The Castle to the art piece. The novel, published after Kafka died, is about a secretive and often unresponsive bureaucracy, following the protagonist’s constant struggle against inscrutable authority, all to gain access to ‘The Castle’. Many people have read the messages in the novel as anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, and even a critique of the class divide.

If we take those themes, as intense as they are, and look at Blake’s work with them, it’s easy to see. A small act, a small thought, instrumental in the disruption of the status quo. It’s almost a call to arms.

Other Walls, Other Art

At the James Cohan Gallery in New York, Blake recreated The Castle, but with a different text. Still Franz Kafka, though. In 2019, he used red bricks to create “Amerika”, using the Kafka novel of the same name.

When Blake did this, it was as the Trump administration went into shutdown, and as Donald Trump was advocating for the construction of the wall between the US and Mexico.

The wall on this art piece, according to visitors, was large and oppressive. One critic wrote that ‘its foreboding presence is like an affront to the space, cutting through like national borders through landscape’.

Once again, the use of this specific text, this specific author, in this specific time… It just goes to show that Blake is very clearly trying to make a point. His art, like many, is made with a purpose. That purpose? To show the impact a thought, a book, or a person, can have on the systems around them, no matter how small they might feel.