Scott Anderson: Biotech

Sarah Diver

It is easy to feel lost, and get lost, in Scott Anderson’s paintings. The decaying body parts, fleshy amorphous limbs, and melting balloon-like shapes swim through bright blues, pulsating greens, and textured yellows. Each canvas – a “weird membrane,” as the artist calls it – becomes flypaper for the detritus of art history, the artist’s subconscious, and an endless doubling of the viewer’s own interpretation. The paintings are portals between interiority and exteriority: loudly questioning what it means to be a painting, both image and object, in the present world.

The sensation of looking at one of Scott Anderson’s paintings can feel akin to peering into an anxious mind made embarrassingly real and public, as if the interior contents of someone’s brain were thrown from buckets onto a wall. Each of Anderson’s paintings begins as a drawing sketched out in “fast” media, like colored pencil, pastel, crayon, or pen. This allows the artist a liberty in generating each drawing almost akin to stream-ofconsciousness writing. The drawings become maps for Anderson’s paintings; as he builds each canvas, he edits, refines, and plays with color, material, and composition as a way of processing his own mindset concurrent with the moment of the drawing. The paintings become a way of interrogating the rawness and intimacy of the artist’s own psychology, an impulse both specific to Anderson’s upbringing and all-encompassing and objective through its translation to painting.

Scott Anderson was born in Illinois into a highly conservative Evangelical Christian family and spent his formative years in the Midwest. The “romance,” as he calls it, around these religious ideologies always intrigued him, as Evangelical Christianity emphasizes emotional growth and transcendence through the confession and forgiveness of sin. While Anderson moved away and eventually disavowed his religious upbringing, the artist has often described his work in terms of an “agnosticism.”

As with agnostic thought, divinity is neither absent nor present, but simply unknowable, and with each painting, there exists both a rationalized dismantling of Anderson’s own psyche and a hopeful questioning of the possibilities within the present reality and within painting as a object in the world. In other words, a battle between tangible emotions and rational thought made bare on the canvas through the lexicon of painting. As Anderson has said, his works are both “images of the things, and are the things themselves.”

Six paintings comprise this exhibition titled Biotech. “Bio-” presupposes a wide variety of etymological meanings – biology, symbiosis, bioluminescence. All related to systems and bodies, cells and processes that move and make our world alive. “Tech” is the antidote to the dynamism, aliveness of “bio” and comes from the Greek word for artistry, art, and skill, techni (τέχνη). While connotatively many might associate “biotech” with the sleek machinations of start-ups, robotics, and hypercapitalism, the word in its literal sense could perhaps be understood as a stand-in for the act of painting, where the human body translates thought through the material technology of paint on canvas. More broadly, however, technology (the “tech” of “biotech”) has become a truly blanket term to describe so much of what makes up contemporary social interactions, the physical built world, and even the state of the economy: namely, thousands of machines that have been finely tuned to enact specific roles within the world, and by now, dictate human experience. As technology becomes further refined through human skill and innovation, so do the methods of finer and finer control for the “bio” of our world, the manipulation and surveillance of bodies in time and space. This is where the paintings of Scott Anderson live, inside the friction between the representational and the abstract, between now and then, between bodies and society. Between inside and outside the mind. Between the organic and the manmade. In Duck Bone in Leg

Left: Duck Bone in Leg 2019. Oil, oil crayon, ink, and sawdust on canvas. 42 x 35 in/107 x 89 cm.

Right: Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms. 2019. Oil, ink, and flocking powder on canvas. 75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm.

(2019), a muddy taupe-colored zigzag runs through a prone yellow mass with a bloody colored exposed ribcage or vein structure, and we gaze upon the painting as if examining an open-heart surgery. Is the patient diseased? Is the bone connected to the flesh? Do the vital organs jolt in a defiant rhythm of life? Or likewise, in Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms (2019), anxious faces become confused with the sprouting spores of many mushrooms, all emerging from an oxblood sea. Will the fungus devour the swimmers? Or if they survive, will they ever be the same? Consider the myth of the Lernaean Hydra, a monster whose many heads, once severed, would immediately grow back to take its place. A grey, seated figure’s chest explodes with body parts, a gory shadow to its left and something like a headless nude near a window to its right; the body replicated and replaced over and over again in Anderson’s Lernaean Thumb Drive (2020), an agnostic questioning of the limits of data, of the self, of the body reified through an infinite groping of color and extremities.

One could call upon past artists and historical moments to understand certain impulses within the works: the associative collage-like elements of Rauschenberg and the Neo-Dadaists, the gestural-verging-onabstract renderings of the human form from German Expressionists, or the bright synthetic colors from Pop artists. Yet, these works neither pay homage to these historical precedents nor abandon them completely. Instead, each of Anderson’s paintings asks sincerely what one can make of painting’s history and presents the struggle between object and subject, image and language, in real time. The paintings question themselves through the juxtaposition and slippage between the different recognizable elements, simultaneously flattening and exploding the canon. They ask, “What do you make of me and my falling-apart-ness? Who or what am I?” The grasping burnt flesh of a Matisse-like figure surrounds a cacophony of concentric oranges, blacks, greens, and yellows in Theory and Law (2020). While the cartoonlike undulating shapes threatening the center of this work could be seen as Philip Guston-gone-wild, the chaos tearing and collapsing the forms onto themselves cries for “theory!” and “law!” as opposed to “history!” to make sense of the turmoil inherent to the scene. The weathered synthetic purples and battered blacks of Several Rads

Left: Theory and Law. 2020. Oil, oil crayon, ink, colored pencil, sawdust, and gouache on canvas. 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm.

Right: Several Rads. 2019. Oil, ink, and sawdust on canvas. 44 x 48 in/112 x 122 cm.

(2019) that outline strange plumbing, a network of bladders and elbows, weakly call out, “Am I rad, dude?” Similarly, in Small Gardener (2019), a snot-colored slumping mass pokes and prods in the dark as oozing bladders and cryptic crinkled miniatures invade from the flanks. One could imagine seeing the little gardener with X-ray vision, and being shocked to discover Polykleitos’ Doryphoros, leaning with contraposto, lurking just beneath the surface, crusted over with puss or barnacles. Yet, no matter what historical ephemera one might cast onto this image, any historicizing inclination rises solely from the viewer’s bodily response to the crusty snotfigure, unceasing, grotesque, and somehow wanting. The works catalyze thought and become systems of representation unto themselves, like symbols from a visual language wrought through their own history. Coronavirus (COVID-19) now pours onto this broken world like water in a riverbed, exposing the faultlines, cracks, and inconsistencies that were always present in society but now stand in high relief. It threatens to break it all open. At the core of the collective fear and potential for suffering in this pandemic is the human body – the locus of grief, a litmus test, a vehicle of both safety and danger. And while the paintings in this exhibition predate the outbreak of the virus, Anderson uses the complete lexicon of painting’s material and connotative potential to display this vulnerable and ugly truth about the human body felt so poignantly today across the globe.

Sarah Diver is an emerging writer and curator located in New York, NY. During her tenure as part the curatorial staff at Storm King Art Center between 2016 and 2020, she helped realize several major outdoor exhibitions, including artists like Mark Dion, David Smith, Jean Shin, Elaine Cameron-Weir, and Heather Hart. In 2015, she curated an exhibition on contemporary indigenous printmakers at the International Print Center New York. She received her MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University in 2016, and her BA in art history, studio art, and chemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013. She is currently writing a cookbook-memoir.