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Indifferent to Art
The mystery of artists unaware of how we see their
work, maybe even of how they make it.
By Jonathon Keats
Creative Growth Art Exhibition, Jan 22-April 3, Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, 701
Mission St., S.F., (415) 978-2787; Creative Growth Art Center: 355 25th St.,
Oakland, (510) 836-2340.
Over the past 15 years, Judith Scott's sculpture has
been reviewed favorably in the New York Times, acquired by major museums
worldwide, and sold by downtown
Manhattan
galleries
for upwards of $11,000. Does it detract from her considerable achievements that
she isn't even dimly aware of how her work is perceived? How does one evaluate
the work of a preternaturally gifted artist who suffers from Down syndrome?
Scott is only the most famous and talented of the roughly 140 developmentally
disabled painters and sculptors at
Creative
Growth
Art
Center
,
in
Oakland
.
Work by the majority of these artists is avidly collected; that of Scott and
eight colleagues is being shown in
Yerba
Buena
Center
's
new curator-selected exhibition, Leon Borensztein and His Friends. This
show—like a smaller one at the San Francisco Main Library last summer of work
from a similar art center, San Francisco's Creativity Explored—will doubtless
be applauded: who in the Bay Area would make derogatory comments about artwork
by those with autism, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities? In some cases, the
regard will be merited, though the blind rush to praise these artists seems as
condescending and derisive as blanket scorn. Among artists, Scott and a few of
her colleagues, such as Donald Mitchell (who was recently given Creative
Growth's first solo show), are unusual because they are mentally impaired. Among
the disabled, they are unusual because they're artistically significant.
Growth in 1987, it had been in existence for 15 years—the oldest and largest
such organization in the country. Founded in the living room of
Berkeley
psychologist
Elias Katz and educator Florence Ludins-Katz,
Creative
Growth
Art
Center
was
based on two extraordinary premises. First was the belief that developmental
disability has no bearing on artistic capability. Second was the principle that
anyone who shows an interest in making art should have the facilities to do so,
even if the work never progresses beyond scribbling. At Creative Growth, art is
a personal endeavor rather than collective therapy.
With professional artists providing technical assistance in painting, sculpture,
woodworking, printmaking, ceramics, and textile work, nearly 1,000 people have
now passed through this renowned five-day-a-week program (funded privately and
by the state)—free to develop at their own pace and, when they're ready, to
show and sell their work in an adjoining gallery that stages up to nine small
exhibitions a year.
Scott's story is by now familiar to those who collect her sculptures. At 44, she
had spent her entire adult life incarcerated in state mental institutions in her
native
Ohio
,
where doctors' failure to diagnose her deafness had led to the belief that she
had an IQ of 30 and was incapable of learning even basic communication.
Eventually, her twin sister intervened, transferred her to a group home in
Berkeley
,
and sent her to Creative Growth.
For the first few months, Scott simply scrawled on sheet after sheet of paper
while gazing with autistic-seeming detachment around the room. None of the
supervisors knew what to do with her. She didn't care about paint or clay. Then
one day somebody sent her over to the rug-making group, where some of her peers
were weaving tapestries. Puzzled by the activity but drawn to the materials,
Scott wandered into a corner, picked up some sticks, cut herself a length of
yarn, and started binding them together. By the end of the afternoon, she'd
invented her own art form.
Her sculptures, which she's been making six hours a day, every day, ever since,
are remarkable for their variety in structure, color, and texture, coherent as a
body of work through their consistency of technique. With their eccentric shapes
and tight wrap of bright yarn, they resemble the fetishes of an extinct cult,
laden with impenetrable meaning. There's an undeniable temptation to unravel
these pieces, checked by the recognition that whatever lies at the core—the
artist has been known to use packing foam, tree branches, a broken electric
fan—will reveal less rather than more. Scott has been known to call her works
"baba," or babies, and they truly are her progeny, as tentatively
present as she is.
In contrast to Scott's suburban
Midwest
childhood,
Donald Mitchell grew up in inner-city
San Francisco
,
the third of 11 children. He was thrown into public schools despite moderate
retardation exacerbated when he was hit by a bus at age 13. A tendency toward
violence (diagnosed as schizophrenia) landed him in juvenile hall and then in
foster homes. In 1975, when he was 24, a caseworker recommended Creative Growth.
Mitchell was still scribbling when Judith Scott arrived 12 years later. It
wasn't until 1992 that he discovered, in the mass of abstraction, the human
form. It didn't have hands or feet. The arms were barely stubs; the head was
just a large blob. On its own, the figure was no more remarkable than a child's
doodle, but Mitchell began drawing it over and over again, gathering a perfectly
anonymous crowd. These interchangeable characters have been his companions ever
since.
Thousands of drawings and paintings depict them in endless configurations, often
densely crosshatched, mobbed together to the point of obliteration. Mitchell has
explained that they are "women eating cupcakes" and "men running
in the grass." His designations seem arbitrary. His figures could be
anybody; they are universal and, no matter what the context or how close their
proximity, painfully isolated. From his experience in estrangement, Mitchell
distills forceful visual parables of alienation.
Mitchell and Scott share a compulsive drive for repetition with the others at
the art center whose work is significant. Daniel Miller covers sheets of paper
with words, mostly pertaining to hardware, until his verbiage becomes as
concrete as the objects designated. In his drawings, William Tyler (whose work
is not in the show) depicts himself and his twin brother living in a
straight-edge world furnished almost entirely with clocks and calendars, waiting
for nothing. But obsessive reiteration is a quality of all good artists: think
of Picasso's women, Pollock's drips. Perhaps such activity isn't voluntary for
the developmentally disabled. Perhaps they're not aware of what they're doing.
That makes no difference; it's the work that counts.
Does this mean, as some proponents of so-called outsider art have claimed, that
artistic expression is a product of mental impairment? Certainly the
developmentally disabled are more likely than the general populace to have one
necessary condition for creating art: their lack of inhibition permits them to
devote years to making things without obvious purpose, to open-ended
exploration. At the same time, they are less likely to have something equally
essential: a capacity for nuanced articulation, a maturity of expression.
Scott and Mitchell have this capacity. Unlike the pleasantly decorative arts and
crafts of most in the show—innocuous paintings that give away everything they
have to say on the first pass—the urgent expressions of Mitchell and Scott
initiate a genuine conversation: the more openly we respond to these sculptures
and drawings, the more deeply they question the distinctions between the artists
and us, and, by extension, the differences to be bridged between any two people.
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