For 71-year-old British artist Tim Scott, his two current exhibitions in Toronto present a rare opportunity for reflection. In the upstairs balcony spaces at Corkin Gallery, he has installed a quiet little show of his most recent clay sculptures: humble, hand-built objects that reflect his early enthusiasm for primitive art and also for Le Corbusier, evoking a kind of timeless, primal architecture.
Across town, in a rented warehouse, Corkin’s friend David Mirvish (the Toronto theatrical impresario, former art dealer and art collector) has assembled a bold exhibition of Scott’s earlier work from the sixties, the sculptures that made his name in the art world: huge, hard-edged, highly coloured abstract works that seem to cartwheel through space, like Ellsworth Kelly abstracts caught by a gust of wind.
The contrast is striking, telling the tale of an artist who has explored the language of sculpture over a lifetime, reflecting as well the artist’s journey along the trajectory of life, from youthful exuberance and daring to the weightier contemplations of later years. Ingenuity gives way to wisdom and soulful gravity, and a connection to the past.
Somewhat rumpled in appearance, Scott is skeptical of journalists, one can tell, and he sat down with me with an air of resignation for the requisite hour of journalistic probing. Walking through the gallery in search of a quiet spot to sit, I asked him to respond to the sculptures by Canadian artist Ian Baxter&, which fill the central gallery alongside his own – vertical metal clamps holding aloft taxidermied animals, birds and fish.
“For me, these pose a question about what sculpture is supposed to be about,” Scott said with an air of resignation and some disappointment. “The problem is that now sculpture is allowed to be about anything you like.” I find my mind floating to the bisected livestock of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, icons of the fashionable British sculpture of the past few decades.
“What we were taught, with Caro [sculptor Anthony Caro was his teacher in the 1960s], and what I have come to also believe, is that it is the job of the sculptor to resist this confusion in the order of things,” he said. “Sculpture is a category of objects that somehow resists being the same as all the other three-dimensional objects in the world – the coffee cups, the machines, the doorknobs, automobiles. Each artist must find their own way to make that distinction.”
Scott’s early works, on view in the Mirvish warehouse, seem to exemplify that approach. They are studies in pure optical sensation unmoored from representation. In one work from 1968, panes of white, grey and cream-coloured Plexiglas take a wild ride over an armature of dark green metal tubing. Another, from the following year, is a burst of vivid yellow and orange rectangular fibreglass panels, precisely arranged to avoid the impression of stasis. The sleeper in the show is Counterpoint VIII (1972), a clear acrylic and raw steel work that traces a kind of flexing arc, a tightly compressed, economical exercise in planar geometry and the sensations it can produce in the viewer. While Scott’s work drew on the look of his times, exploiting the new phenomenon of plastic, it is quite clearly a different order of object from things in the world.
Scott’s newer works in clay are in sharp contrast with the formally crisp, shiny and brightly coloured sculptures in the Mirvish show. Instead of weightlessness and buoyancy, these later works are earthbound, wearing their wrinkles and creases with pride, gently submitting to the pull of gravity on material flesh. Optical thrills have given way to bodily pleasures of a simpler sort. Is this an old man’s art, I ask?
It’s an idea he will gingerly entertain, but only after we have talked through the details of his artistic journey to date: first, his childhood awakening among the mummies and funerary sculptures of the British Museum; his lineage as the son of famed Chinese and Japanese theatre scholar A.C. Scott and his first brush with modernism in the pages of a book on modern art by the European art-book publisher Skira. Later, there was his sudden, startling encounter with Caro at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, when he was still studying architecture (Scott signed up for part-time classes at the art school, and caught the bug); his first contact with the metal sculptures of American David Smith and with the searing optics of Matisse cut-outs; and then, the art historical moment when he and his fellow emerging artists broke through in the New Generation show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1965. (Scott had his own solo show at Whitechapel in 1967.)
“We had new techniques, new materials,” he recalled about the 1965 exhibition. “What we were doing was completely devoid of all the old, expressionistic, heavy, angst-ridden feeling” associated with the work of then leading European artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Germaine Richier and Edouardo Paolozzi.
In addition to making art, Scott would go on to pursue a lifetime of teaching in Britain and Germany (with periodic forays around the globe, including one to Edmonton), and his more recent clay works come out of this experience directly, inspired by an exercise he put himself through while preparing to teach a sculpture class in London in the early eighties. Selecting photographs of early sculpture from the textbooks, Xeroxing them and placing them on a wall display, he realized the objects were predominantly clay. “They were, you know, things from pre-Colombian art, Aztec, Mexican, African pottery from Nigeria – you know, shaman and ancestor figures, that sort of thing. They didn’t call it sculpture, of course. It was for use.”
Crafting these works in response, Scott takes his place in that lineage, even if unconsciously, making shapes that recall mankind’s first sculptural explorations but also his own early fascination with the volumes and textures of Le Corbusier. Thus they mark a return to earliest pleasures and satisfactions, and a reprieve from the heavy lifting involved in fashioning epic sculptures from metal and Plexiglas.
“It does connect directly to the ancient past,” he said, “and I can do these, I can make these works, without having to work so hard. The sheer joy of this is a tremendous relief.”
House of Clay: Recent Sculpture continues at Toronto’s Corkin Gallery, 55 Mill St., Building 61, until Dec. 20. The 60s: When Colour Was Sculpture is on view at David Mirvish Warehouse at Pacart (1410 Warden Ave.) until April (information for both shows: 416-979-1980).
