Review November 15, 1999

Michael Scott
American Sports
Tate Gallery through December 4
Article by Anthony DiMaggio

The ability to distill and generalize helps us to understand the richness of experience. As we capsulize the matrix of organic chaos into a symbolic representation, we are able to swallow its infinite depth and magnitude in one clean, succinct gulp.

Reducing complex questions into their essences often requires focusing upon the parameters that define their complexities. In his new works, Michael Scott identifies the essence of American sports by delivering amazingly powerful diagrammatic paintings of the fields upon which our games are played. All untitled works, each painting is scaled proportionately to the actual size of the field it represents, and is mechanically rendered so as to conceal the subjective hand of the artist. Like his cunning parking lot paintings from his previous exhibition, these dry, slick, minimal surfaces reveal the grids, lines and forms which symbolize the rules and boundaries of sport.

The efficiency and clarity of these works return to sport the innocence of play and leisure. The flat fields of color and definitive lines create surfaces that passively await projection. As symbolic representation, they become vessels that catch our organic associations and experiences. Although seemingly cold and detached, their power as cultural symbols allows us to inject warm personal memory into open generalizations. As we reflect on the games we played and loved as children, they stir nostalgia and welcome us to again see sport as a simple yet dynamic activity, void of all the contemporary commercial hype and distraction.

As these surfaces provide the static grids and boundaries of each field of play, empty of obvious formal dynamics, they achieve signification by providing the quiet templates upon which all action follows. They are the proverbial “clean slates” – the drawing boards upon which the infinite cycle of possibilities can be rendered. Within the scope of these fields of possibilities lies not only our memories of past experience, but the anticipation of all the drama that will ensue in the future. Within the ordinance determined by rules and regulations, a wonderful drama unfolds between the rigid system of lines and boundaries and the implied poetry of motion that they so elegantly accommodate.

By offering only a basic physical, inorganic structure, the anticipation, excitement, and nostalgia of leisure activity are free to run unchecked by specific representation. A large baseball field that consumes an entire gallery wall conjures the monumentality of a day at any larger-than-life ballpark. The vast green outfield so cleanly produced mimics the abstract sight of oceans of green grass seen from so far up in the lines and perimeters so warped by the normal perspective view. The glimpse thus becomes an abstraction from the view to which we are all so accustomed and lets us see a baseball field in it’s awesome totality.

While most works in this exhibition have the ability to lean towards abstraction, a blue painting with black lines representing a swimming pool looks more cryptic and enigmatic than purely symbolic. The effect leads the viewer to simultaneously reflect on it’s known identity, yet marvel at the true intrigue of the visual signifier – the blue pool becomes a strangely beautiful diagram or puzzle.

Yet, all was not perfect in the exhibition, and it pains me to negatively digress from the above accolades. Two works should have clearly been omitted. One was an ink collage of images such as players and icons that appear as stock graphics from packaging of sports products or goods. The only way I could have enjoyed this work would have been in the context of pure sarcasm, as if to mock these representations in light of the evocations of the paintings, but that intentions was hardly evident. The other work worthy of omission was a little model of a golf course set upon a pool table. While a clever combination, the product is little more than the sum of its parts, and fails to draw any poignant connections between the two games. While the golf course is indeed intricately crafted and worthy of technical mention, within the context of the other so skillfully rendered propositions of the exhibition, it is a disappointment.

Despite the two works which should have been scratched, the power of the paintings was spectacular in their ability to conjure the purity of sports within the structures that define them. In fact, there are a few smaller paintings hidden in the galleries office that are worth demanding to see. One in particular is a small bowling alley. The small scale, especially in comparison to the other works reveals an intimate beauty to the surface upon which we bowl, especially in comparison to some of the larger fields of play. Curatorially, this, as well as the other small works, should have taken the place of the above mentioned indiscretions.

To complement the visceral experience of the successful works, these fields, like the parking lots conceptually spin the modernist notion of the grid in compelling ways. While not conventional, square grids, these fields are grids which formally map the physical boundaries of sport. Like the modernist notion of the grid, as proposed by Rosalind Krauss in the Originality of the Avant Garde, where it defines and maps the flat picture plane out of which is born the image of the pictorial surface, these grids define the expanse of the territories upon which the activity of games are born. Instead of organizing the regions upon which are flung the individual expressions of the sublime, his encompass a general representation of the arenas that contain the movements and rhythms of sport. Through his use of the grid, Michael Scott initiates the pictorial field to brilliantly symbolize the literal fields of our cultural pastimes.



Copyright © 2003, Michael Scott