May 10 through June 20, 2015
57 Stanton St. (at Eldridge Street)
New York

247365, which recently moved from its location in Brooklyn’s Donut District arts outpost to a new space on Stanton Street in Manhattan, is currently showing recent work by Brian Belott, in an exhibition called “Dr. Kid President Jr.” Dozens of paintings are spread across two walls, and a book has been published by the gallery to coincide with the show, along with a zine published by the artist. The paintings, the book, and the zine all expand on Belott’s interest in children’s art, which has previously been evident in his work, though perhaps not so explicitly as here.

The images — made with vivid, matte Flashe paint on canvas — are all reproduced from art by children from around the world, found in books collected by Belott. The titles, such as The Bears, Marcelo Abramovsky, Age 8, Argentina (2014) and Clown 1960’s Art Education (2014) give some indication of that derivation. So, too, with the pseudo-naïve handling of line and form. The figures are haphazardly lumpy, protean, archetypal — exactly the kind of free and uninformed qualities that have drawn Belott, the Surrealists, Expressionists, Cubists, and others to images like these since at least the 19th century. For many, the uninfluenced work of children and outsiders was considered a basis for new artforms free of the strictures of art history and academic images. These connections and interests aren’t new, of course, but being reminded of them can be affecting, even as written through the hands of a skillful adult.

When asked about Belott’s connection to this material, 247365 co-founder MacGregor Harp explained that the artist considers his work more in the vein of Art Brut. That self-identification may be in contradiction with Belott’s education at the School of Visual Arts, though the claim’s credibility is also essentially ancillary to the work itself.

Some of the images appear antiquated, such as two different and nearly identical renderings of men with swords, both titled A Duel, Gustavo da Silva, Age 9, Argentina (2015). Although there are cars in the background, the two armed protagonists face each other at the center foreground and they appear as if engaged in some pre-modern rite, brandishing weapons at one another while two groups of men in top hats are arrayed on each side. The landscape is described almost exclusively with bands of muted greens and blues, and trees line the horizon in a neat row.

One can see amazing leaps in dexterity and technical proficiency between children only a few years apart in age. The interior scene depicted in Mother and Son, Mumtaz Sultan Ali, Age 12, India (2014) probably has as much innate sophistication as a lot of contemporary deskilled painting. And Radiation, Keith School, Age 16, Rockford, IL. (2015) could be completely at home in a survey of Fauvist painting.

The gallery-published book, smartly titled Brian Belott: Early Works, is comprised of a selection of Belott’s own childhood drawings. Star Wars characters, ninjas, pirates, skeletons and other characters stand, tumble and fly across the pages, rendered in marker and pen, occasionally with juvenile text. One drawing is inscribed with the sweetly adolescent “LOVƎ.” In another, there’s the surprising and sophisticated list:

COBALT
CHLORIDE
METHYL-
SALICYL

Belott’s zine, meanwhile, is filled with arrays of drawings by children, each page organized into a block of similar images: scribbles, indecipherable cruciform symbols, heads sprouting arms and legs, blocky windows and hashmarks. Neither book offers any commentary, and instead stand simply as compilations of marks, attempts to understand the world and to understand these elemental depictions of it. Harp explained the catalogues as Belott trying to find unadulterated markmaking.

In addition to calling attention to this well of source material, Belott is also using the show to encourage more children to make art. Interestingly, earnestly, he has pledged his half of the proceeds of any sales to Art Start, an arts program for children who “live in city shelters, on the streets, are involved in court cases, or surviving with parents in crisis.”

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October 24, 2014 to March 29, 2015
200 Eastern Parkway (at Washington)
Brooklyn, 718 638 5000

Visitors to “Judith Scott: Bound & Unbound,” currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, are confronted early with one of the artist’s first masterpieces, Untitled (1988), a substantial, architectural sculpture that has been hung on the wall, as in relief. Twined and tied around several bundles of sticks is a vivid array of materials: woolen yarns, fabric strips and plastic tape in a dazzling range of colors, along with green gardening wire of different gauges. The thicker wire loops and swirls around the heart of the structure, while smaller, shaggy-headed knots of the thinner-gauged wire peek out from various crevices like diaphanous sea anemones. At nearly five feet tall, it is one of the larger works on view, and also one of the few to hang on the wall rather than rest supine on a platform. Whether this deliberate curatorial decision would have been met with approval or not by Scott (who died in 2005 at the age of 61) is anyone’s guess. Not only did she never speak a word about her work, she gave no titles to any of her more than 200 sculptures and left no instructions about her intent for their display. In fact, once Scott finished a sculpture, she seemed to have little interest in ever revisiting it. These thorny details, among others, must be grappled with when staging an exhibition of her complex and endlessly fascinating work.

“One of the biggest challenges to presenting the work of an artist whose voice was sharply circumscribed by her life experience is to avoid adding layers of interpretation that can calcify into a narrative fable,” writes Catherine Morris, a co-curator of the present exhibition in the thoughtful catalogue that accompanies the show. Nonetheless, it’s nearly impossible to discuss Scott’s work without a modicum of information about her biography. She and her twin sister Joyce were born in Cincinnati, in 1943. While Joyce was intellectually typical, Judith was born with Down Syndrome. Her parents institutionalized her by age seven, and she remained so for the next 35 years, until Joyce secured guardianship of her twin, and brought Judith to live with her family in northern California. It was around this time that Judith was finally diagnosed as being profoundly deaf, a condition that was likely caused by an acute bout of scarlet fever she’d suffered in early childhood, but which had somehow gone undetected for decades. Deafness also then accounted for Scott’s muteness. For most of her life, she’d been almost entirely cut off from the world.

In 1987, Joyce Scott enrolled her sister at the Creative Growth Art Center, a place of radical experiment for artists with developmental disabilities. Rather than using art as therapy, Creative Growth is structured as a communal art studio, where participants are given freedom to work at their own pace with whatever materials suited their interests, and with minimal instruction. Instead, they work alongside typical, working contemporary artists who provide guidance or practical assistance only as needed. It was there, about a year after her initial enrollment, that Scott discovered textile arts, and completed her first wrapped work, and thereafter she worked steadily and regularly, five days a week for the next 18 years, right up until her death (her final work, from 2005, remained unfinished and is included here).

Scott became adept at her distinctive technique of ardent binding as her work matured. She always began with a found object that acted as the anchor of the sculpture—a crutch, a baseball bat, and a tabletop fan all found their way into her work, for example—and most frequently Scott wrapped it so abundantly that the original form is rendered unrecognizable. Occasionally, as in Untitled (1993), she attached small accessories, such as beads or stones to the exterior, but more often these small tokens found their way inside the work, and the exact contents of each sculpture is usually unknown, imbuing them with a totemic quality.

She also had a sophisticated sense of color and formal control. Another work, also Untitled (1993) finds an unknown object (or objects) completely encased in woolen yarn in a surprising color combination of lavender and burnt sienna. The shape Scott has rendered is womblike, with a pregnant belly of orange-brown yarn tapering, at two ends, into slender and elegant lavender protrusions. The work is so unexpected, so gentle, and so pleasing that one must resist the urge to bend down and caress it. And in Untitled (2003) Scott incorporated a long, gauzy, white ribbon and green mesh into a piscine object swathed in rich cerulean and aquamarine yarn. The highlights of candy-apple red yarn sporadically interwoven into this marine combination pack a visual punch, and one can’t help but think of strange fish, moving through mysterious waters at the ocean floor.

Gerardo Mosquera was speaking about the problems of ethnocentrism when he coined “The Marco Polo Syndrome” in 1992 and, in an essay of the same name, wrote, “What is monstrous about this syndrome is that it perceives whatever is different as the carrier of life-threatening viruses rather than nutritional elements… It has brought a lot of death to culture.” To cast a wider net, the argument also makes a similar point for artists who are different physically or mentally, or who make their work far outside the confines of an established art scene. “Art Brut” and “Outsider Art” are terms that feel increasingly and painfully outmoded, yet somehow seem to persist in contemporary discussions. Morris and Matthew Higgs, the show’s co-curator, have made an assiduous effort in the exhibition to note Scott’s developmental disabilities without resorting to interpreting her work solely through its lens, the wall text in the show is blessedly spare, imparting essential facts but refusing to dwell on them. Instead, the focus is where it should be: on an artist whose laborious and unique process resulted in an output that demands protracted consideration, but which in turn yields both mystery and discovery. “Bound and Unbound” dignifies Scott’s work, and finally invites the artist into the art-historical conversation, not as a marginalized “other,” but as a peer.

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July 21 to October 27, 2013
279 Montauk Highway
Water Mill, NY, 631-283-2118

(Reviewed at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 9 to May 12, 2013)

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Jean Dubuffet (1902-1985) were friends of the privileged collector Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990). Heir to a Philippines sugar fortune, Ossorio lived and worked during his creative life in East Hampton, New York. A gay practicing Catholic, he aspired to synthesize Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut. This exhibition, presenting the three men as peers, aims to reveal the elective affinities of two famous painters, who themselves never met, and, also, to demonstrate what Ossario, who was friends with both men learned from each of them. It includes one large Pollock masterpiece, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist); some important smaller paintings and art on paper; and a number of works such as Collage and Oil (1951) that reveal him struggling. And, in a marvelous demonstration showing how consistent Jean Dubuffet was in the period 1946 to 1958, it presents both his little drawing Corps de dame (Body of a Lady) (1950) and the majestically large Paysage métapsychique (Metaphysical landscape) (1952). Very different, they both are first-rate pictures.

That Pollock and Dubuffet can happily cohabit as near equals is, of course no surprise. What here is up for grabs is Ossorio’s artistic relationship with these two modernist masters. He tends to place figurative elements or shapes not unlike Dubuffet’s in a Pollockesque all over field. So, for example, Perpetual Sacrifice (1949) floats faces in a field of white lines; Crucifix: Seek & Ye Shall Find (1951) deploys a heavily painted field of lines on a shaped canvas, with a crucifix shape giving form to that field; and Martyrs and Spectators (1951) sets the outlines of a crucifixion scene in a framework of black and white. Advent (1951), the best of Ossorio’s paintings on display runs lines of green, red and yellow around a vertical standing figure. He lacks the single-mindedness of Pollock at his best and, also, the very high level of excellence of Dubuffet in this period. You have the sense, rather, that driven by his awareness of the greatness of his friends’ art, Ossorio was experimenting restlessly without ever achieving real resolution. So, for example, Red Family (1951) uses a figure like some Dubuffets; and Head (1951) employs a drawn field akin to some of Pollock’s weaker pictures. But where Pollock mastered a language of personal abstraction, evidenced in his great little painting on paper Number 22A, 1948; and Dubuffet immersed figures in flatted fields, Ossario, a gifted eclectic always remains uncomfortably suspended between abstraction and the figure.

This Eurasian Catholic must have been a fascinating personality. And it must have been tricky for him to befriend and collect two such different and apparently overwhelming figures. But he isn’t a great artist. In the catalog essay Alicia Longwell says that Clement Greenberg, who admired both Pollock and Dubuffet believed that “an artist had to suppress any hint of representation to achieve a level of distinction in art making.” This statement, which is emphatically not correct, misrepresents Greenberg in an unfortunate, very misleading way. What is the case is that a great artist must be single minded. Connoisseurship is out of fashion—it is commonly said to be politically incorrect. Ossario was a well connected artist; an interesting artist; a skilled artist: but what this misguided exhibition inadvertently shows is that he was minor. Successful curators need to be connoisseurs.

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