John Scott’s carvings foretold the coming storm
By Doug MacCash, NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE
It might seem like just another grim artistic stroll down Katrina memory lane. But, trust me; it’s not nearly that simple.
- “Balcony”, 2003
The late John T. Scott’s woodblock carvings, now on display at Arthur Roger@434 gallery, depict mountains of debris avalanching into the New Orleans streetscape. Look closely and you’ll be able to pick out ruined car parts, shattered record albums, battered French doors, balustrades, and even a handgun in the jagged, anxiety producing junk piles. Some of the depressing trash heaps are so high they almost blot out the street signs, some reach all the way from the curb to the wrought-iron balconies.
Familiar sights for anyone who suffered through the aftermath of the 2005 storm and flood, right?
But here’s the thing. Scott, a giant of the Crescent City art scene, made these carvings in 2003. So what we have here isn’t post-Katrina documentary art; it’s an amazingly accurate, if accidental, premonition. Eerily, Scott even titled one of the pieces “Storm’s coming.”
The carved blocks were originally used to create an edition of large-scale black and white prints. Scott, a long-time Xavier University professor, renowned for his muscular metal sculptures, approached the project with customary bravado. He used a modified miniature chain saw to rip and grind the images of junk-choked streets in plain, pine plywood, producing plenty of sawdust, smoke, sparks and noise.
“I used a circular chain saw,” Scott told me in 2003. “It’s a tool you couldn’t finesse. It remained raw. And pine is a very hard wood. The wood was participating in the process. It made the whole thing that much more interesting. It’s a simple, direct form of working, a very primal form.”
Scott, who was awarded a $315,000 John D. MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a “MacArthur genius grant” in 1992, explained his inspiration for the Blues Poem images like so: “All of these derelict cars, houses and people you see when you drive around, it becomes a cacophony. I went out to Southern Scrap (junkyard) and climbed on these piles of crushed cars and took photographs for about an hour. A junkyard is like a John Chamberlain (a renowned modernist whose abstract works were made of crushed car parts) on speed. In urban America, we don’t see it anymore. In New Orleans we look past the trash. I tried to put these things together so they’re inseparable.”
- “Storm’s Coming”, 2003
By juxtaposing scrap yard images with New Orleans street scenes, Scott honed a political edge on his Blues Poem prints. Symbolically speaking, he may have been hinting that we’re burying ourselves in our own societal failures. That’s my take anyway. Just look at some of the titles: “Planning for Urban Renewal,” “Dangerous,” “Stop Sign,” and “Yesterday’s Doorway.” The Blues Series was probably a warning.
But it was never intended as a hurricane warning.
Of course, intentions don’t hold a candle to cosmic coincidences. Hurricane K chased Scott to Houston. When the levees failed, his eastern New Orleans studio was badly flooded and the Blues Poem blocks floated around and settled in the silt with the rest of his art and equipment. Friends did their best to salvage Scott’s works from the mess. Gallery director Arthur Roger said the warped and waterlogged Blues Poem blocks were almost unrecognizable. He referred to them as having a ghost-like quality.
As the city struggled to recover, the curbs and sidewalks became occluded with debris. Meanwhile, Scott was fighting a losing battle with pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease that kept him tethered to a Texas hospital, awaiting a transplant, unable to return home.
Those beautiful blocks you see on the gallery walls are the same ones that steeped in muddy floodwater, though they’ve been cleaned, flattened and reinforced, meticulously repainted to look like pre-flood plywood, and rolled with a shiny coat of black ink as if they are ready to print. That’s the way Scott wanted it. Roger said Scott always viewed the blocks as pieces of art in their own right. Before he died in 2007, he consulted on their restoration by remote control from Houston.
I told this story to an art lover who was wandering through the gallery on the day the exhibit opened, and she summed up the aesthetic situation succinctly, saying something like: “Well, if they weren’t about Hurricane Katrina before, they are now.”
Are they ever.
The circle was Scott’s favorite symbolic shape. No one would appreciate the boomerang path the Blues Poem has taken more than him.