Tim Scott

C o u n t e r p o i n t X III , 1 9 7 3 / 7 4 aluminum, steel and plexiglass block 48 x 272 x 36 inches

Counterpoint XX 1976/74 steel and plexiglass 60 x 72 x 72 inches

C o u n t e r p o i n t V, 1 9 7 4 steel and plexiglass 54 x 78 x 67 inches

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L OR E TTA HO WA RD GA LLERY

Tim Scott in the 1960s AND 70s

“White water which is pure is as inconceivable as clear milk.”— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tim Scott rose to prominence in the mid-1960s, at a time when sculpture was being transformed. Triggered by David Smith’s audacious ability to combine existing metal forms into composite, collage-like abstract works, sculpture ceased to rely upon traditional means of modeling and molding. A so-called “new generation” of sculptors emerged in Britain, including Philip King, William Tucker, Isaac Witkin and Scott, who privileged color and explored new materials such as fiberglass, painted steel and plastic. Scott’s work is distinct, however, not only because of the way that he assembled forms into striding narrative complexes but through his use of colored sheets of acrylic—a material that links his work to the glossy palette of Pop Art and roots his sculpture in the real world.

Scott was trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London from 1954 through 1959, while also studying part time at the St. Martin’s School of Art where he was a student of Anthony Caro’s. At this time Caro was a figurative sculptor who worked from the example of Henry Moore, creating heavy yet curvaceous bronze bodies with textured surfaces. After completing his dual training, Scott left for Paris where pursued an architectural career, working in the Le Corbusier-Wogenscky atelier from 1959 through 1961.

Critics often gloss over Scott’s formation and early training as an architect—his seeking out of Le Corbusier, a master whose understanding of the centrality of the human body is articulated in his famous painted diagram of human scale, The Modulor. Not only from Le Corbusier would Scott have grasped this fundamental metric (which centrally informs his sculpture), but he would also have derived a heightened sense of color and materials. When Scott was in the atelier, plans for the Centre Le Corbusier in Zurich (1963-1967) would have been developing, and this cast concrete pavilion with its bright palette of rectangular planes would ideally fertilize the sculptor’s imagination. There indeed seems more than a casual affiliation between Scott’s combining of acrylic and steel, color and shape, throughout his work in the 1960s.

When Scott undertook the Bird in Arras series, allowing his forms to unfurl into space, his concept of sculpture became less of an object and more of a display.

The arching sequential rectangles that comprise Bird in Arras III (1968) radiate upward, flowing through space, improbably mapping straight edged forms over a broad curve. The milky acrylic sheets have been screwed to the main steel tube and cross bars, and yet this functional solution does not diminish the lilting lightness of the array. The ease of making belies the nuanced undertone, for “bird in arras” has plural connotations. The words are borrowed from a line in the tightly rhyming poem by Walter de la Mare, “Cake and Sack,” published in 1913.* De la Mare’s book Peacock Pie is a compendium of fanciful children’s rhymes, conjuring images while savoring the sonic texture of words. That Scott would select these words is in keeping with his own poetic aspirations for sculpture.

An arras is a Medieval Flemish tapestry with rich, intricate designs. And for Scott to use the title for a seminal series of work that spans from 1967 to 1970 and encompasses nine major sculptures, each of which are strikingly different in formal composition, speaks to the range of association that he was able to wrest from this terse yet vivid reference.

Bird in Arras VII (1969) presents brilliant sheets of color, radially linked in a helix-like metal network. Rectangles of blazing yellow and bright orange gleam with a vintage Sixties chromatic intensity. There is a luster, a material reality about the age of the acrylic sheets akin to vintage Perspex sculpture by Naum Gabo, which makes this work feel like a vanguard relic from a prior utopian era. The particular hue of Scott’s plastic is important, for it evidences today, four decades after its making, the clear-minded intentionality of the artist. The chosen colors are highly specific and their interaction deliberate, offering a close keyed palette. The impact of Bird in Arras VII, which acquires internal balance despite its constantly rotating and shifting geometry, results from the dynamism of acrylic sheets that do not simply depict color, but actually are color. This is a key attribute of Scott’s work—understanding that color is a substance, a medium in itself. Metal screws pass through it, surrounding space becomes pigmented, and viewers must negotiate its sharp edges and sprawling glow. In this regard, Scott’s visual thinking aligns him closely to the concerns of painters like Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski who were fixated with finding techniques through which to deliver sheer color directly to the viewer.

As the 1970s unfolded, Scott elaborated his exploration of forms in space. Working again in series, the Counterpoint sculptures enabled Scott to distill his materials into clear sheets of acrylic and modeled natural steel. The interaction between steel and plastic became more structural, at times architectural, as in Counterpoint I where the cantilevered horizontal plane juts diagonally, vectoring through space to configure the possibility of a built structure. Scott uses thick blocks of acrylic which lean askew and are held in suspense, often lyrically refuting the actuality of their weight. Complex works like Counterpoint XX read like a three-dimensional meditation on Kazimir Malevich’s compositional rhythms with a single rotated square and variously scaled hovering rectangles slanting in space. Yet Scott’s configured forms elude simple reference. If constructivism surfaces as an interest, so too must one consider the musical reference through titling where Scott gauges whether steel and plastic might be likened to two voices that are harmonically interdependent yet distinct in articulation. As a compositional technique first used in renaissance music and exploited in the seventeenth century, the idea of a harmonic counterpoint infuses the materials with a necessary relationship.

With the Counterpoint series Scott plays with ideas of transparency, allowing weighty slabs of acrylic to alternately appear blocky and light, as solids and voids. The edges form bands that define shapes and quickly recede from sight. The overall structures maintain this paradoxical condition akin to the conundrum contemplated by Wittgenstein when he envisioned the idea of clear milk—possible for the mind, not the eye, to see.

Dav id M o o s *“Cake and Sack” by Walter de la Mare (England; 1873-1956) begins as follows: “Old King Caraway / Supped on cake / And a cup of sack / His thirst to slake; / Bird in arras / And hound in hall / Watched very softly / Or not at all;...”

Note: A version of this essay was published in Tim Scott, exhibition catalogue, David Mirvish, Toronto, 2008.

cover B IR D IN A RR A S V II

1 9 69

painted steel tubes and acrylic sheets 100.5 x 121 x 119 inches

this page and right B IR D IN A RR A S III

1968

painted steel tubes and acrylic sheets 111 x 228 x 164 inches