Press
NEW YORK TIMES
January 29, 1999
ANTHONY GOICOLEA/ MICHAEL SCOTT
Tate Gallery
Mr. Goicolea's striking black and white photographs appear to be intimate documentary shots of difficult moments in the lives of emotionally disturbed or mentally impaired pre-adolescent boys; in fact, they are staged, with the artist himself acting the part to psychologically convincing effect. Mr. Scott uses LEGOs to construct brightly colored pictures of anonymous men, and he makes expansive paintings of parking lots that read as elegant Minimalistic abstractions.
-Johnson
January 29, 1999
ANTHONY GOICOLEA/ MICHAEL SCOTT
Tate Gallery
Mr. Goicolea's striking black and white photographs appear to be intimate documentary shots of difficult moments in the lives of emotionally disturbed or mentally impaired pre-adolescent boys; in fact, they are staged, with the artist himself acting the part to psychologically convincing effect. Mr. Scott uses LEGOs to construct brightly colored pictures of anonymous men, and he makes expansive paintings of parking lots that read as elegant Minimalistic abstractions.
-Johnson
TIME OUT NEW YORK
July 29 - August 5, 1999
"Millennium"
Tate Gallery
People generally know what the passing of 10, 25, 50 or even 100 years means; but what about a millennium? Is it the end of the world, or just a fresh start? That’s the question raised by at least one group in this final summer of the 20th century. “Millennium” takes a techie view of the big 2K; everything in it is about codes, circuits and virtually realities-and that’s just fine. The show is both fun and satisfyingly coherent.
Adam Ross, Gen X’s answer to Yves Tanguy, paints futuristic cityscapes, including one nice predominantly blue number here. Niki Monroe finds that the future is now in his series of flashy, uncentered images of Las Vegas, which beautifully capture the artificiality of the place. Takuya Chikushi’s views of malls, elevated trains and escalators in Japan seem equally unreal. Michael Scott “paints” his male subjects, who seem trapped between pain and pleasure, with pixellike Lego blocks, while Aaron Romine proffers his version of the apocalypse in the form of a slick, sweet and appealing image of group sex...(article continues)
July 29 - August 5, 1999
"Millennium"
Tate Gallery
People generally know what the passing of 10, 25, 50 or even 100 years means; but what about a millennium? Is it the end of the world, or just a fresh start? That’s the question raised by at least one group in this final summer of the 20th century. “Millennium” takes a techie view of the big 2K; everything in it is about codes, circuits and virtually realities-and that’s just fine. The show is both fun and satisfyingly coherent.
Adam Ross, Gen X’s answer to Yves Tanguy, paints futuristic cityscapes, including one nice predominantly blue number here. Niki Monroe finds that the future is now in his series of flashy, uncentered images of Las Vegas, which beautifully capture the artificiality of the place. Takuya Chikushi’s views of malls, elevated trains and escalators in Japan seem equally unreal. Michael Scott “paints” his male subjects, who seem trapped between pain and pleasure, with pixellike Lego blocks, while Aaron Romine proffers his version of the apocalypse in the form of a slick, sweet and appealing image of group sex...(article continues)
REVIEW
November 15, 1999
Michael Scott
Tate Gallery
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.
-Anthony DiMaggio
November 15, 1999
Michael Scott
Tate Gallery
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.
-Anthony DiMaggio
NEW YORK TIMES
Jully 14, 2000
“Game On!”
Sara Meltzer Gallery
Fourteen artists have fun with sports in this smart and playful show. The two members of Type A wrestle on video; Sylvan Lionni’s simulation of a Ping-Pong table and Michael Scott’s baseball field on canvas both elegantly parody 1960’s style formalism; Jason Dodge offers a drop-dead sleek conflation of sports and commodity fetishism; and Christopher Chiappa presents a concrete crash helmet.
-Johnson
Jully 14, 2000
“Game On!”
Sara Meltzer Gallery
Fourteen artists have fun with sports in this smart and playful show. The two members of Type A wrestle on video; Sylvan Lionni’s simulation of a Ping-Pong table and Michael Scott’s baseball field on canvas both elegantly parody 1960’s style formalism; Jason Dodge offers a drop-dead sleek conflation of sports and commodity fetishism; and Christopher Chiappa presents a concrete crash helmet.
-Johnson
TIME OUT NEW YORK
July 6-13, 2000
"Game On!"
Sarah Meltzer Gallery
Abstract painter Frank Stella used to say that Ted Williams was a genius, since the baseball player could see the stitches on a 90-mile-an-hour fast-ball. Now, you ask, why should a painter really care? Answer: The Hall-of-Famer's incredible vision in the batter's box offered Stella the perfect metaphor for modernist painting's goal of pure opticality, where eye and object become linked in a single, powerful moment.
It only goes to show that sport offers rich, if playful, territory for art - something reinforced by 14 artists in the punchy show "Game On!" A couple are right there with Stella: Michael Scott's large untitled canvas is shaped like a baseball field, with green grounds and brown base paths executed with almost absolute flatness; a warning track runs along its top edge in a lyrical, if not utterly romantic curve...(article continues)
-Tim Griffin
July 6-13, 2000
"Game On!"
Sarah Meltzer Gallery
Abstract painter Frank Stella used to say that Ted Williams was a genius, since the baseball player could see the stitches on a 90-mile-an-hour fast-ball. Now, you ask, why should a painter really care? Answer: The Hall-of-Famer's incredible vision in the batter's box offered Stella the perfect metaphor for modernist painting's goal of pure opticality, where eye and object become linked in a single, powerful moment.
It only goes to show that sport offers rich, if playful, territory for art - something reinforced by 14 artists in the punchy show "Game On!" A couple are right there with Stella: Michael Scott's large untitled canvas is shaped like a baseball field, with green grounds and brown base paths executed with almost absolute flatness; a warning track runs along its top edge in a lyrical, if not utterly romantic curve...(article continues)
-Tim Griffin
ART IN AMERICA
May, 2003
Michael Scott
Kagan Martos Gallery
Known for his 2001 series of large-scale portraits of professional athletes constructed entirely of Lego blocks, Michael Scott continued to explore relationships among sports, art and popular culture in his recent solo exhibition. Only Mythos (Mike Tyson) was made of the signature Lego; the rest of the pieces utilized other mass-produced materials in intriguing ways. For example, in an untitled “painting” from 2002, neon-yellow felt was stretched like a canvas, and a vertical silver line was painted down the center, referencing a tennis ball and a Barnett Newman-esque painting at once.
Scott’s unusual choice of materials underpins some of his strongest works, as he brings prefabricated models, miniature trees and green flocking to bear on his sports theme. Sylvan Dreams is a 66-inch circular structure, hung on the wall: a model of a baseball diamond in green flocking is surrounded by a dense mass of fir trees, similar to those used in model train sets. In Par 3 Hole 15 Metro (2002) an elaborate plastic model of an early 20th century New York streetscape becomes an urban golfer’s dream – a course, like an extravagant roof garden, sits atop the adjoining buildings.
In a somewhat didactic work titled Ascension, an image of Michael Jordan dunking a basketball is presented as a Gothic arch-shaped stained-glass panel mounted on a lightbox; reaching for the hoops suggests a quasi-transcendental feat. Scott compares sports stars not only to saints, but also to great artists: the heads of Shaquille O’Neal, Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods sit atop replicas of the lower halves of marble busts labeled Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci.
More subtle in its approach is the sculpture Lap, a model of an Olympic-sized swimming pool juxtaposed with a sandy beach and waves. Made of cast acrylic, the piece hangs on the wall like a painting, but juts out at the bottom so that the viewer sees the work at an unexpected angle. The combination of nature – ocean waves and sand – with the man-made gridded pool is esthetically and conceptually more complex than some of the other sports-themed works.
The artistic exploration of North America’s obsession with sports seems a quirky project, somehow doomed to fail. Yet Scott’s ingenuity with materials, his thoughtful presentation and meticulous craftsmanship give these pieces an integrity that deserves a second, more thoughtful look.
-Melissa KuntzMelissa Kuntz
May, 2003
Michael Scott
Kagan Martos Gallery
Known for his 2001 series of large-scale portraits of professional athletes constructed entirely of Lego blocks, Michael Scott continued to explore relationships among sports, art and popular culture in his recent solo exhibition. Only Mythos (Mike Tyson) was made of the signature Lego; the rest of the pieces utilized other mass-produced materials in intriguing ways. For example, in an untitled “painting” from 2002, neon-yellow felt was stretched like a canvas, and a vertical silver line was painted down the center, referencing a tennis ball and a Barnett Newman-esque painting at once.
Scott’s unusual choice of materials underpins some of his strongest works, as he brings prefabricated models, miniature trees and green flocking to bear on his sports theme. Sylvan Dreams is a 66-inch circular structure, hung on the wall: a model of a baseball diamond in green flocking is surrounded by a dense mass of fir trees, similar to those used in model train sets. In Par 3 Hole 15 Metro (2002) an elaborate plastic model of an early 20th century New York streetscape becomes an urban golfer’s dream – a course, like an extravagant roof garden, sits atop the adjoining buildings.
In a somewhat didactic work titled Ascension, an image of Michael Jordan dunking a basketball is presented as a Gothic arch-shaped stained-glass panel mounted on a lightbox; reaching for the hoops suggests a quasi-transcendental feat. Scott compares sports stars not only to saints, but also to great artists: the heads of Shaquille O’Neal, Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods sit atop replicas of the lower halves of marble busts labeled Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci.
More subtle in its approach is the sculpture Lap, a model of an Olympic-sized swimming pool juxtaposed with a sandy beach and waves. Made of cast acrylic, the piece hangs on the wall like a painting, but juts out at the bottom so that the viewer sees the work at an unexpected angle. The combination of nature – ocean waves and sand – with the man-made gridded pool is esthetically and conceptually more complex than some of the other sports-themed works.
The artistic exploration of North America’s obsession with sports seems a quirky project, somehow doomed to fail. Yet Scott’s ingenuity with materials, his thoughtful presentation and meticulous craftsmanship give these pieces an integrity that deserves a second, more thoughtful look.
-Melissa KuntzMelissa Kuntz
Exposes
SURFACE ANNUAL EDITION #26, 2000
By Marisa S. Olson
It’s crazy how normal Michael Scott’s childhood was. Raised in South Jersey, he got along well with his younger sister, his parents never divorced, nothing traumatic ever happened to him. What, then, would prompt a 30-year-old man to create porn images out of Legos? Surely there must have been something wrong. “Actually, I lived a very happy childhood,” says the artist, whose large-scale Lego mosaics of male porn stars, frozen in action at the moment of orgasm, were the front runners of Nikolai Fine Art’s recent group exhibit Toy Show. “Now I’m just questioning those things that made me happy.”
With work so, er, stimulating, most viewers find themselves between a rock and a hard place, trying to draw quick and dirty conclusions about its meaning. Ruling out erotic fetishes, Scott actually flinches an the leftover ‘normal guy, weird art’ interpretation. The expressions in his Lego mosaics are something most of us see regularly (hopefully). The true perversion is in the decontextualizing of sex. “Like most boys, I spent some time visiting the porn world…” recalls the artist, who now finds himself absorbed in the task of unraveling the banal perfection that blankets suburbia. “I’m simply talking the time now to go back and pull apart the layers of my own history.”
Scott’s Parking Lot and Sports Fields series give viewers an inside track on further extensions of Scott’s thinking and a wider glimpse at his largely autobiographical body of work. Schematics of real parking lots from Scott’s hometown take his graphic renderings to a new level, referring “not only to the large role which the car and parking lots play in the daily life of a suburbanite, but how almost unwittingly our daily activity is organized.”
Both the parking lots and the sports fields have a psychoachitectural feel, referring to proper and improper positions for middle class occupation. From the vantage-point of grappling for position, the three series have more in common than one might first surmise. Scott is spinning a conceptual web of place, space and propriety while trying to make retrospective sense of the subjects in his life. “Once you leave school and all the shelter that the art world is willing to afford you,” Scott reasons, “you start wondering how you can, or should, make your mark.” Scott decided to go back to his roots, looking for the pure essence of his personality. He landed in the middle of suburbia and has slowly worked to climb his way out. “I guess I’m trying to give it some meaning. It ‘s been so much a part of my life; if it has no meaning, I suppose I don’t either.”
Scott’s tendency to compartmentalize his own ideas is what drew him to represent these specific images. Slightly disgusted by the shadowy sweetness of suburbia’s gloss, he is also cursed by an obsession with organization. “Most of the play happens before I create the work,” he says, chuckling a the irony. Carefully diagramming his pieces before embarking upon their creation, Scott isn’t one to be swept away in the moment of creation. Nonetheless, his rigidity has bred a different sort of conceptualism. With a shoot-from-the-hip brand of thinking, Scott represents society’s boxes (lots, fields, TV images) by co-opting the box, hijacking it and passing it off as a new interpretation informed by years of slow and steady suburban enculturation.
Speaking of art imitating life, Scott’s not-so-torturous research regimen into the Lego series (hundreds of hours of porno-watching) led him to the conclusion that “all the good stuff happens somewhere between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’” With endearing awkwardness, he describes the ‘hard’ work involved in finding the “perfect” climax shot: It must be emotive, dramatic, and a ‘clean’ image – that means no feet or other obstructions blocking his view. View-blocking is something Scott is so over.
More than anything, Scott’s into making art for himself. “Indulging your urges and doing it for yourself is a little like masturbating,” he admits. But there’s always an audience for that, and Scott is happy to play to the voyeurs. There’s a hint of romantic, emotional benevolence in his work, far more intimate than a stranger’s coital face could ever be. Scott captures commonality in a way that speaks volumes about the basic language of human desire and frustration (which often go hand in hand-especially in the suburbs). It is in this way that Scott can realistically claim that he “recognizes” himself in the faces of the porn stars. Likewise, it is in this vein that viewers can insert themselves into Scott’s post hoc autobiographical narrative, if only by virtue of their shared relationship with his subjects and materials - Legos, parking lots and ping pong tables. We’ve all been there and done that. Scott forces us to ask ourselves about the significance.
So what’s next for the vernacular artist? “I’m taking a break from flat surfaces,” he says, with the sort of nervous anticipation of an emerging artist daring to branch out from his signature. He’s currently at work on a series of 3-D domestic pieces, including a windowless, doorless Lego home situated atop hollow cabinetry. Scott, whose remarkable craftsmanship was refined in a year of postgraduate stone-carving in Italy, is deeply engrossed in self-criticism with his work. Referring again, with a grain of salt, to life in the ‘burbs, Scott recalls that his family used to try “every five years or so” to demonstrate their recent good fortune by slapping a new layer of formica on their cabinets. “We weren’t really adding anything more to our lives than 1/16th of an inch; yet we had to show others that we did well, that we were up-to-date.” Such recognitions place Scott ahead of his years, admitting his family’s faults – or worse, their banality - in swooning narrative pieces.
“The suburbs are a fantasy world,” Scott concludes. “I’m just trying to question that fantasy, to find something redeeming in it, to redeem myself. Maybe I’m reaching for something that’s not there. In any case, I’m trying to make people look at everyday things differently. To see it, not just look at it.” Even if the first encounter feels like love at first sight.
By Marisa S. Olson
It’s crazy how normal Michael Scott’s childhood was. Raised in South Jersey, he got along well with his younger sister, his parents never divorced, nothing traumatic ever happened to him. What, then, would prompt a 30-year-old man to create porn images out of Legos? Surely there must have been something wrong. “Actually, I lived a very happy childhood,” says the artist, whose large-scale Lego mosaics of male porn stars, frozen in action at the moment of orgasm, were the front runners of Nikolai Fine Art’s recent group exhibit Toy Show. “Now I’m just questioning those things that made me happy.”
With work so, er, stimulating, most viewers find themselves between a rock and a hard place, trying to draw quick and dirty conclusions about its meaning. Ruling out erotic fetishes, Scott actually flinches an the leftover ‘normal guy, weird art’ interpretation. The expressions in his Lego mosaics are something most of us see regularly (hopefully). The true perversion is in the decontextualizing of sex. “Like most boys, I spent some time visiting the porn world…” recalls the artist, who now finds himself absorbed in the task of unraveling the banal perfection that blankets suburbia. “I’m simply talking the time now to go back and pull apart the layers of my own history.”
Scott’s Parking Lot and Sports Fields series give viewers an inside track on further extensions of Scott’s thinking and a wider glimpse at his largely autobiographical body of work. Schematics of real parking lots from Scott’s hometown take his graphic renderings to a new level, referring “not only to the large role which the car and parking lots play in the daily life of a suburbanite, but how almost unwittingly our daily activity is organized.”
Both the parking lots and the sports fields have a psychoachitectural feel, referring to proper and improper positions for middle class occupation. From the vantage-point of grappling for position, the three series have more in common than one might first surmise. Scott is spinning a conceptual web of place, space and propriety while trying to make retrospective sense of the subjects in his life. “Once you leave school and all the shelter that the art world is willing to afford you,” Scott reasons, “you start wondering how you can, or should, make your mark.” Scott decided to go back to his roots, looking for the pure essence of his personality. He landed in the middle of suburbia and has slowly worked to climb his way out. “I guess I’m trying to give it some meaning. It ‘s been so much a part of my life; if it has no meaning, I suppose I don’t either.”
Scott’s tendency to compartmentalize his own ideas is what drew him to represent these specific images. Slightly disgusted by the shadowy sweetness of suburbia’s gloss, he is also cursed by an obsession with organization. “Most of the play happens before I create the work,” he says, chuckling a the irony. Carefully diagramming his pieces before embarking upon their creation, Scott isn’t one to be swept away in the moment of creation. Nonetheless, his rigidity has bred a different sort of conceptualism. With a shoot-from-the-hip brand of thinking, Scott represents society’s boxes (lots, fields, TV images) by co-opting the box, hijacking it and passing it off as a new interpretation informed by years of slow and steady suburban enculturation.
Speaking of art imitating life, Scott’s not-so-torturous research regimen into the Lego series (hundreds of hours of porno-watching) led him to the conclusion that “all the good stuff happens somewhere between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’” With endearing awkwardness, he describes the ‘hard’ work involved in finding the “perfect” climax shot: It must be emotive, dramatic, and a ‘clean’ image – that means no feet or other obstructions blocking his view. View-blocking is something Scott is so over.
More than anything, Scott’s into making art for himself. “Indulging your urges and doing it for yourself is a little like masturbating,” he admits. But there’s always an audience for that, and Scott is happy to play to the voyeurs. There’s a hint of romantic, emotional benevolence in his work, far more intimate than a stranger’s coital face could ever be. Scott captures commonality in a way that speaks volumes about the basic language of human desire and frustration (which often go hand in hand-especially in the suburbs). It is in this way that Scott can realistically claim that he “recognizes” himself in the faces of the porn stars. Likewise, it is in this vein that viewers can insert themselves into Scott’s post hoc autobiographical narrative, if only by virtue of their shared relationship with his subjects and materials - Legos, parking lots and ping pong tables. We’ve all been there and done that. Scott forces us to ask ourselves about the significance.
So what’s next for the vernacular artist? “I’m taking a break from flat surfaces,” he says, with the sort of nervous anticipation of an emerging artist daring to branch out from his signature. He’s currently at work on a series of 3-D domestic pieces, including a windowless, doorless Lego home situated atop hollow cabinetry. Scott, whose remarkable craftsmanship was refined in a year of postgraduate stone-carving in Italy, is deeply engrossed in self-criticism with his work. Referring again, with a grain of salt, to life in the ‘burbs, Scott recalls that his family used to try “every five years or so” to demonstrate their recent good fortune by slapping a new layer of formica on their cabinets. “We weren’t really adding anything more to our lives than 1/16th of an inch; yet we had to show others that we did well, that we were up-to-date.” Such recognitions place Scott ahead of his years, admitting his family’s faults – or worse, their banality - in swooning narrative pieces.
“The suburbs are a fantasy world,” Scott concludes. “I’m just trying to question that fantasy, to find something redeeming in it, to redeem myself. Maybe I’m reaching for something that’s not there. In any case, I’m trying to make people look at everyday things differently. To see it, not just look at it.” Even if the first encounter feels like love at first sight.
INTERIOR DESIGN
September 1, 2007
Michael Scott's depiction of Muhammad Ali necessitated a 19-foot-wide blank wall in the lounge, in this Arthur Casas designed Chelsea penthouse.
September 1, 2007
Michael Scott's depiction of Muhammad Ali necessitated a 19-foot-wide blank wall in the lounge, in this Arthur Casas designed Chelsea penthouse.
Catalog Essays
Michael Scott
Marella Arte
2001
Daily Rituals
By Cloe Piccoli
Anthropologist Marc Auge’s description of the Parisian subway adapts well to the interpretation of Michael Scott’s work. In effect, the French anthropologist discovers in the Parisian subway map a normative and impersonal structure that encodes our movements and directs our lives. With cool acrylic colors and extraordinary precision, Michael Scott reveals in his paintings, the structures that arrange the fabric of American suburban daily life. Scott dwells upon parking lot schemes, upon white and yellow, vertical, horizontal, and oblique lines. He records sports fields’ structures: tennis, baseball, golf, and basketball. Auge’s idea of stage, which he proposed for the subway stations, fits well to Michael Scott’s scenes: deserted places and representative ambits that order and codify our behavior by dictating the rules of games and actions. The extreme care and precise draftsmanship, the exasperate realism perceived as abstract composition, lead us to think about the impersonal and anatomical absurdity of such purely functional and functioning locales, places which organize our life into a labyrinth of “no-places,” places with no history, no memory, no specific geographical or identifying references.
The idea of representation reemerges in Michael Scott’s series of LEGO works. These are portraits of sports stars: Michael Jordan, Pele, Michael Johnson, and Tiger Woods, depicted in their higher moments of concentration and effort. Their faces are stereotypes, images leading us immediately not to their person but to their character, images drawing us towards the cultural and semantic references that these athletes symbolize. Michael Scott portrays athletes intent on playing a specific role defined by mass media. This tentacled system is the normative structure and codified map where these stars are playing, along with the audience. Scott’s reference to the idea of sport’s sensationalism, media, and telecasting is obviously stated in his work. The choice of LEGO, with its predefined modular, impersonal, and commercial attributes, underlines the technical reproductive quality of the artwork, and immediately references the images’ construction module, the pixel.
To embody a role, to act under a normative system that repeats itself throughout a lifetime, is all part of contemporary rituals. Michael Scott’s attention to individual and collective daily rituals masterfully takes shape in his work Untitled 2001. Its focus is a sculpture of a Roman cathedral model whose inside presents a basketball court instead of benches for the faithful. The tower clocks are scoreboards, and the playing field assumes the church’s perimeter. The superimposition of the church with the playing field is a declaration of the equivalence between sports and religious rituals.
Michael Scott invites us to watch this provoking and disturbing ritual dimension, one which portrays our daily life through tidy maps, codified behavior systems, and pre-arranged game rules - rituals which form our contemporary identity.
1. Marc Augè, Un ethnologue dans le mètro, Hachette, Parigi, 1986
Marella Arte
2001
Daily Rituals
By Cloe Piccoli
Anthropologist Marc Auge’s description of the Parisian subway adapts well to the interpretation of Michael Scott’s work. In effect, the French anthropologist discovers in the Parisian subway map a normative and impersonal structure that encodes our movements and directs our lives. With cool acrylic colors and extraordinary precision, Michael Scott reveals in his paintings, the structures that arrange the fabric of American suburban daily life. Scott dwells upon parking lot schemes, upon white and yellow, vertical, horizontal, and oblique lines. He records sports fields’ structures: tennis, baseball, golf, and basketball. Auge’s idea of stage, which he proposed for the subway stations, fits well to Michael Scott’s scenes: deserted places and representative ambits that order and codify our behavior by dictating the rules of games and actions. The extreme care and precise draftsmanship, the exasperate realism perceived as abstract composition, lead us to think about the impersonal and anatomical absurdity of such purely functional and functioning locales, places which organize our life into a labyrinth of “no-places,” places with no history, no memory, no specific geographical or identifying references.
The idea of representation reemerges in Michael Scott’s series of LEGO works. These are portraits of sports stars: Michael Jordan, Pele, Michael Johnson, and Tiger Woods, depicted in their higher moments of concentration and effort. Their faces are stereotypes, images leading us immediately not to their person but to their character, images drawing us towards the cultural and semantic references that these athletes symbolize. Michael Scott portrays athletes intent on playing a specific role defined by mass media. This tentacled system is the normative structure and codified map where these stars are playing, along with the audience. Scott’s reference to the idea of sport’s sensationalism, media, and telecasting is obviously stated in his work. The choice of LEGO, with its predefined modular, impersonal, and commercial attributes, underlines the technical reproductive quality of the artwork, and immediately references the images’ construction module, the pixel.
To embody a role, to act under a normative system that repeats itself throughout a lifetime, is all part of contemporary rituals. Michael Scott’s attention to individual and collective daily rituals masterfully takes shape in his work Untitled 2001. Its focus is a sculpture of a Roman cathedral model whose inside presents a basketball court instead of benches for the faithful. The tower clocks are scoreboards, and the playing field assumes the church’s perimeter. The superimposition of the church with the playing field is a declaration of the equivalence between sports and religious rituals.
Michael Scott invites us to watch this provoking and disturbing ritual dimension, one which portrays our daily life through tidy maps, codified behavior systems, and pre-arranged game rules - rituals which form our contemporary identity.
1. Marc Augè, Un ethnologue dans le mètro, Hachette, Parigi, 1986
Michael Scott
Marella Arte
2001
The Sporting Life
By Jennifer Dalton
Michael Scott's newest paintings and sculptures represent ordinary everyday life in the simplest and most iconographic way. Although his new works portray sports fields and famous athletes, Scott's subject is not so much the specific world of sports as it is the meticulously stylized sites, carefully maintained boundaries, and ritualized dramas that weave the fabric of mainstream American life. Though Scott's work has always employed subjects that are culturally charged, he has constructed a role for himself as an impartial observer and mapper of contemporary life, exposing its external patterns and internal contradictions and presenting them to the viewer unedited.
Each of Scott's paintings represents a simplified aerial view of a sports field: an American football field ringed by a running track, a set of five adjacent basketball courts, a soccer field, and a golf driving range. Each is painted using mechanically straight lines, few colors, and no visible brushstrokes. Open expanses of flat color are unmarred by the presence of actual players. Significantly, these fields are not arenas where world-class athletes entertain thousands of spectators; each playing area is edged by a small black-top parking lot, which locates it firmly in a suburban residential neighborhood. These are ordinary places for ordinary people: soccer fields where children are dropped off after school; basketball courts where friendly men gather on weekend mornings; a track where folks are more likely to jog or walk than race. Rather than calling attention to the highest achievements of athleticism, Scott examines the ritual of sport as it is practiced by ordinary citizens. His works are compelling symbols of contemporary life at its most enjoyable and banal.
Each of the four LEGO panels on view depicts a famous athlete whose name is synonymous with his sport: Michael Jordan, Pele, Michael Johnson, and Tiger Woods. These two-dimensional sculptural works clearly reference the ancient technique of mosaic, but LEGOs, as modern, mass-produced children's toys, carry a strong significance of their own. LEGO pieces are industrially made, regularly sized, rectangular interlocking pieces that implicitly claim to be the ideal building unit. But as every child learns when attempting to make a curved object, LEGOs' limitations are severe. Scott makes a point of reminding the viewer of the immutable squareness of LEGOs by leaving the edges of his athlete portraits jagged. This highlights the images' resemblance to ancient mosaic fragments and lends their subjects the aura of religious icons, an allusion Scott clearly intends.
Though the irregular shape of each panel bears little resemblance to a television screen, the image each contains is of an athlete as we view him perform close-up on TV, an ordinary activity that gives immense ordinary pleasure to millions of viewers. Each athlete is shown in a moment of concentration and exertion, mimicking Scott's 1998 LEGO mosaic series that captured porn actors' faces at their moment of climax. In both these series the viewer's presumed association to the depicted scene is through a television screen. Both sports and pornography sell the performers' emotions to spectators as a commodity. Televised sports provide a theater through which many of us vicariously experience hope, drama, anxiety, disappointment, and achievement. In his famous essay, "The World of Wrestling," Roland Barthes analyzed the mythologies and signs of that particular sport. Although he wrote specifically about wrestling performances that were as full of artifice as theater, most of his comments can be broadly applied to contemporary professional athletics. His observations remind us that sporting contests are staged for the benefit of an audience; that primal urges are acted upon on cue; and that the emotions on view are intended to be intelligible, satisfying, and larger than life. Scott, too, views sports as mythology, and his paintings and sculptures can be read as icons of these myths--neatly encapsulating, in their spare forms, the drama and ritual of sports in American life.
Though Scott takes his subject matter from popular culture, most of his work relies heavily on minimalist tradition. Each sports field is reduced to its bare essence; each has been carefully purified of any elements not utterly necessary to an immediate reading of the image. The delineating lines within the fields and parking lots recall that holiest of minimalist structures, the grid. The LEGO works rely on mass-produced, modular units; the hand of the artist is always invisible. However, Scott's three-dimensional sculptures function differently from his two-dimensional works both formally and conceptually. Level, 1999, is a full-sized pool table whose surface has been replaced by an intricate scale model of a nine-hole golf course, complete with cue sticks that the viewer can use to propel miniature golf balls. Untitled, 2001, is an altered kit model of a Romanesque cathedral. Its clock towers have been fitted with faux electronic scoreboards, and its interior has been replaced by a miniature basketball court. The power in each of these two sculptures is in their juxtaposition of mismatched, yet resonating, elements. In the case of Level, the apposition is between social classes; in fusing a golf course with a pool table, Scott calls attention to the neat schism between the segments of American society which typically engage in each leisure activity, while pointedly refraining from any comment on that schism or on class structure in general. In Untitled, Scott compares our society's passionate affinity for sports to religious devotion, again facilitating the viewer's reflection rather than passing judgment. Taken as a whole, Scott's work exposes the parallels--obvious or surprising--between sports and pornography, between sports and religion, between ancient and modern modes of representation, between types of recreation for adults and children, and between leisure pastimes of the upper, middle and lower classes.
Scott's work is rooted in his own experience growing up in the suburban United States, an experience with which millions of others--both inside and outside the US--can relate. Suburban life has been subject to numerous critiques by artists and city-dwellers (many of whom have roots in suburbia) as homogeneous, uncreative, and menaced by enormous businesses promoting one-size-fits all culture such as Wal-Mart, The Gap, and IKEA. Rather than restating those now tired condemnations of suburbia, Scott's work presents refreshingly value-neutral maps of some of its more pleasant locales and allows his viewers to experience the significance of these places and to form their own judgments. Although Scott's work revisits the sites of his childhood, at times depicting specific parking lots and sports fields from the neighborhood in which he grew up, he refrains from excavating and exploring his personal history. Rather, he distills its structures and symbols to their most iconic, universal elements. Scott's decision to reduce these fundamental ingredients of ordinary life to their most pure, generalized representation is calculated to facilitate the viewer's own contemplation. Each of his works functions as a cipher--a blank slate presented without comment. Scott's own emotions are alluded to but remain safely behind the scenes. In this posture of detachment and discretion, these works are the perfect embodiment of suburban American life, exemplifying carefully plotted property lines and well-maintained fences. Sports fields are safe templates within which chaos can reign--sites for emotional struggles ruled by order and regulations. Michael Scott's work is a perfect analogy for this mainstream American lifestyle, in which the whole spectrum of messy human existence is neatly contained within notoriously uniform structures such as tract houses, mini-malls and superstores.
Marella Arte
2001
The Sporting Life
By Jennifer Dalton
Michael Scott's newest paintings and sculptures represent ordinary everyday life in the simplest and most iconographic way. Although his new works portray sports fields and famous athletes, Scott's subject is not so much the specific world of sports as it is the meticulously stylized sites, carefully maintained boundaries, and ritualized dramas that weave the fabric of mainstream American life. Though Scott's work has always employed subjects that are culturally charged, he has constructed a role for himself as an impartial observer and mapper of contemporary life, exposing its external patterns and internal contradictions and presenting them to the viewer unedited.
Each of Scott's paintings represents a simplified aerial view of a sports field: an American football field ringed by a running track, a set of five adjacent basketball courts, a soccer field, and a golf driving range. Each is painted using mechanically straight lines, few colors, and no visible brushstrokes. Open expanses of flat color are unmarred by the presence of actual players. Significantly, these fields are not arenas where world-class athletes entertain thousands of spectators; each playing area is edged by a small black-top parking lot, which locates it firmly in a suburban residential neighborhood. These are ordinary places for ordinary people: soccer fields where children are dropped off after school; basketball courts where friendly men gather on weekend mornings; a track where folks are more likely to jog or walk than race. Rather than calling attention to the highest achievements of athleticism, Scott examines the ritual of sport as it is practiced by ordinary citizens. His works are compelling symbols of contemporary life at its most enjoyable and banal.
Each of the four LEGO panels on view depicts a famous athlete whose name is synonymous with his sport: Michael Jordan, Pele, Michael Johnson, and Tiger Woods. These two-dimensional sculptural works clearly reference the ancient technique of mosaic, but LEGOs, as modern, mass-produced children's toys, carry a strong significance of their own. LEGO pieces are industrially made, regularly sized, rectangular interlocking pieces that implicitly claim to be the ideal building unit. But as every child learns when attempting to make a curved object, LEGOs' limitations are severe. Scott makes a point of reminding the viewer of the immutable squareness of LEGOs by leaving the edges of his athlete portraits jagged. This highlights the images' resemblance to ancient mosaic fragments and lends their subjects the aura of religious icons, an allusion Scott clearly intends.
Though the irregular shape of each panel bears little resemblance to a television screen, the image each contains is of an athlete as we view him perform close-up on TV, an ordinary activity that gives immense ordinary pleasure to millions of viewers. Each athlete is shown in a moment of concentration and exertion, mimicking Scott's 1998 LEGO mosaic series that captured porn actors' faces at their moment of climax. In both these series the viewer's presumed association to the depicted scene is through a television screen. Both sports and pornography sell the performers' emotions to spectators as a commodity. Televised sports provide a theater through which many of us vicariously experience hope, drama, anxiety, disappointment, and achievement. In his famous essay, "The World of Wrestling," Roland Barthes analyzed the mythologies and signs of that particular sport. Although he wrote specifically about wrestling performances that were as full of artifice as theater, most of his comments can be broadly applied to contemporary professional athletics. His observations remind us that sporting contests are staged for the benefit of an audience; that primal urges are acted upon on cue; and that the emotions on view are intended to be intelligible, satisfying, and larger than life. Scott, too, views sports as mythology, and his paintings and sculptures can be read as icons of these myths--neatly encapsulating, in their spare forms, the drama and ritual of sports in American life.
Though Scott takes his subject matter from popular culture, most of his work relies heavily on minimalist tradition. Each sports field is reduced to its bare essence; each has been carefully purified of any elements not utterly necessary to an immediate reading of the image. The delineating lines within the fields and parking lots recall that holiest of minimalist structures, the grid. The LEGO works rely on mass-produced, modular units; the hand of the artist is always invisible. However, Scott's three-dimensional sculptures function differently from his two-dimensional works both formally and conceptually. Level, 1999, is a full-sized pool table whose surface has been replaced by an intricate scale model of a nine-hole golf course, complete with cue sticks that the viewer can use to propel miniature golf balls. Untitled, 2001, is an altered kit model of a Romanesque cathedral. Its clock towers have been fitted with faux electronic scoreboards, and its interior has been replaced by a miniature basketball court. The power in each of these two sculptures is in their juxtaposition of mismatched, yet resonating, elements. In the case of Level, the apposition is between social classes; in fusing a golf course with a pool table, Scott calls attention to the neat schism between the segments of American society which typically engage in each leisure activity, while pointedly refraining from any comment on that schism or on class structure in general. In Untitled, Scott compares our society's passionate affinity for sports to religious devotion, again facilitating the viewer's reflection rather than passing judgment. Taken as a whole, Scott's work exposes the parallels--obvious or surprising--between sports and pornography, between sports and religion, between ancient and modern modes of representation, between types of recreation for adults and children, and between leisure pastimes of the upper, middle and lower classes.
Scott's work is rooted in his own experience growing up in the suburban United States, an experience with which millions of others--both inside and outside the US--can relate. Suburban life has been subject to numerous critiques by artists and city-dwellers (many of whom have roots in suburbia) as homogeneous, uncreative, and menaced by enormous businesses promoting one-size-fits all culture such as Wal-Mart, The Gap, and IKEA. Rather than restating those now tired condemnations of suburbia, Scott's work presents refreshingly value-neutral maps of some of its more pleasant locales and allows his viewers to experience the significance of these places and to form their own judgments. Although Scott's work revisits the sites of his childhood, at times depicting specific parking lots and sports fields from the neighborhood in which he grew up, he refrains from excavating and exploring his personal history. Rather, he distills its structures and symbols to their most iconic, universal elements. Scott's decision to reduce these fundamental ingredients of ordinary life to their most pure, generalized representation is calculated to facilitate the viewer's own contemplation. Each of his works functions as a cipher--a blank slate presented without comment. Scott's own emotions are alluded to but remain safely behind the scenes. In this posture of detachment and discretion, these works are the perfect embodiment of suburban American life, exemplifying carefully plotted property lines and well-maintained fences. Sports fields are safe templates within which chaos can reign--sites for emotional struggles ruled by order and regulations. Michael Scott's work is a perfect analogy for this mainstream American lifestyle, in which the whole spectrum of messy human existence is neatly contained within notoriously uniform structures such as tract houses, mini-malls and superstores.
